


World Enough, and Time

by toooldforthis_ef



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Epic, F/M, Prophecy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:42:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29937057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toooldforthis_ef/pseuds/toooldforthis_ef
Summary: “You came back wrong,” he told her, all those years ago. He was right, but it took them a very long time to realise exactly what that meant. It meant a hundred more apocalypses, a thousand battles. It meant a journey, a prophecy, a war. They’d lose one other, and find their way back, and choose, again and again. And all the while, the earth was failing.There are a lot more people than you think who are here for the long haul – like, the really long haul. This is a story about two of them.
Relationships: Spike/Buffy Summers
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is, in a lot of ways, a love letter to fanfic, and to what I found here when I joined this world last year. This probably shouldn't be your first fanfic, and assumes familiarity with at least the events of AtS S5.
> 
> It is, however, my first fanfic – at least on this side of the keyboard – and my first piece of fictional writing of any kind, so I'd really appreciate your thoughts and comments!
> 
> My beta reader was NellinHell, and I honestly cannot thank her enough for her incredibly focused editing, for her phenomenal energy and support, and for putting me in pronoun jail pretty much constantly. What an incredible editor - this story is hers as well as mine. Thanks also to otherthandead for the final read.

_ Had we but world enough and time,  _

_ This coyness, lady, were no crime.  _

_ We would sit down, and think which way  _

_ To walk, and pass our long love’s day.  _

_ Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side  _

_ Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide  _

_ Of Humber would complain. I would  _

_ Love you ten years before the flood,  _

_... _

_ An hundred years should go to praise  _

_ Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;  _

_ Two hundred to adore each breast,  _

_ But thirty thousand to the rest;  _

_ An age at least to every part,  _

_ And the last age should show your heart.  _

_ For, lady, you deserve this state,  _

_ Nor would I love at lower rate.  _

**_Andrew Marvell_ **

**_==_ **

“You came back wrong,” he told her, all those years ago. He was right, but it took them a very long time to realise exactly what that meant.

==

She thought it was the end. Facing down the root of all evil as chaos unfolded around her, the yells and dying screams of women – girls – roaring in her ears, echoing from the walls of the underground cavern. A knife plunged into her, and she felt a cold deep, deep inside.  _ This is it _ , she thought, very calm, and with her final act passed on the ancient weapon, the work still to do, to her sister slayer.

She took a breath ( _ it felt like the last one _ ), and then another ( _ maybe this one _ ), then another, and with the First’s mocking cries in her ears, the next thing she knew she was staggering to her feet. Once more back from the brink. Nothing new there, not for her, though that was a close one. With all that happened after – sunlight, falling rocks, hands clasped tight,  _ No, you don’t _ – she gave it not another thought. At least, not after Dawn bandaged her rapidly healing wound on the rattling schoolbus, the hole he left in the world fading into the distance. Everything had been quiet, and bright, and held very still, like an indrawn breath or a moment made of glass.

==

The next time Spike saw her face, he was sure it would also be the last, again. The alley was swarming with death, and as he saw Charles fall to his left, bellowing as he dragged one last demon down with him, he whirled to gain firm footing for his last stand. Finding himself back-to-back with Angelus, he was surprised to feel a spark of grim pride, almost love. Them going down together didn’t quite fit, but it would do. The rain sheeted down.

As they set themselves for the next wave, his eyes flicked from one demon to another, gauging strength and speed. The flood thundered down the alley, and he bared his teeth, savage and jubilant, in anticipation of the crash.

He didn't notice the wave breaking right away, starting as it did at the other end of the alley. Demons began to falter, to turn, at something he could not see. Illyria? No, he could hear her behind him, spitting unfamiliar curses in her familiar sweet voice. Down at the end of the alley he began to see flashes of women fighting. Slayers, it must be: had the boy Andrew really come through?

And then, a moment – a shining moment – he saw her face, and she saw him. It all stopped, and it was just like the last time. Her expression was the same that he saw every time he closed his eyes. Silent understanding passed between them, pride and love and desperation. Her eyes shone. She had known, and once again she’d come for him, and she’d come for  _ him. _

That bright instant hung between them, perfect, and then something lurched, and her eyes widened. Just like that she fell, an axe in her back, and just like that the demon wave hit him.

He remembered very little of what came next. It seemed that all the sound had gone out of the world, and someone far away was screaming, and he swung and smashed and bled and spat until there was nobody left to hit, and then he was at her side and again she lay there still and beautiful. The noise rushed in, and all at once he realised he was uttering a pathetic little wail, an continuous stream of  _ no, no no, not now, don’t go _ and that it didn’t quite drown out the ragged rasp of her sudden breathing. She coughed, and opened her eyes right at him, and she said  _ Spike _ , and he sat there, in the soaking rain and the puddles, and he wept.

==

They came together after that, haltingly at first and then all in a rush. Scotland, and San Francisco, and the Deeper Well, back to Los Angeles and jumping through hell dimensions  _ flick-flick-flick _ , a hundred more battles and a dozen more apocalypses and more close calls than they cared to count in the ten years that followed.

“My lucky girl,” he called her, after the last one, both of them lying half-slumped against a menhir in the French countryside, sheltering from the stray bolts of magic as the final skirmishes died in the first greys of dawn. They could hear Willow crying out a half-wild call, drunk on battle-magic. Buffy was stanching the blood from a wound at her hip, close inside where the heart's-blood flowed freely, and yet it was slowing. Her breath came ragged and misty in the air.

He brushed the hair back from her gorgeous face, looking just as it did that first time he kissed her, and his hand hesitated as he felt realization clutch at his heart.

“What?” she said, seeing it pass over his face like a shadow, and then, a little sharper, “What?”

“Not a day older than the day I first kissed you, love…” he breathed, and her eyes flicked to his, one to the other, and he saw comprehension dawning there, and neither of them knew what to say.

==

It took them a long time to be sure. They said not a thing about it for another few years, though she’d catch him looking archly at her anti-aging moisturiser, or chuckling as she got carded when she accompanied him to buy cigarettes. It wasn’t until they were sitting opposite one another outside a nondescript cafe in Athens at dusk, her thighs sticky against the white plastic chair, laying maps across laminated menus that he looked up abruptly and fixed her with a blue-eyed stare.

“We really need to talk, pet. About your expiration date…"

==

After another ten years, they knew. They’d built so much and lost it again, and when they’d changed the world and then changed it back the fights were still the old ones. Both of them still looked the same – a little harder in the eyes, a little thinner and stronger – but despite her forty summers and his two hundred they still moved with the vigour of youth. 

In the bombed-out ruins of a Russian theater they faced down Drusilla for the last time. She was bright-eyed, mad and ferocious, powerful beyond imagining on the blood of slayers and bargains struck with powers both light and dark, bargains at a terrible price. 

It took them all to bring her down. They called Willow out of her endless dimensional wandering, still mad with a new, raw grief. They pulled Dawn from her normality, her husband and her beautiful children, and she drew from down deep within the glowing green core of herself and reshaped the very reality around them. 

They called in old allies and new. Angel and Illyria paused their fruitless search to ride into the deserted town on motorcycles. The swords and axes strapped to their backs shone wickedly. The Conduit stepped lightly into their camp through a portal, her mass of red hair spilling around her, glowing with a surging, roiling power not her own. Persephone appeared between one blink and the next, bringing with her the smell of lilies and petrichor , and making wiry, hard-bitten, aging Faith spill her drink and swear. The Immortal landed a small seaplane on a lake nearby and strolled in with a lovely not-quite-human warrior at his side, revelling in the poisonous looks shot him by both Spike and Angel. They all came.

They all fought, and yet at the end there was only one way it could be: Drusilla crumbled to dust with a sigh and a radiant smile, and Spike let the stake fall from his shaking hand. They all heard the clatter, and they stood in frozen tableau, none wanting to be the first to breathe.

Buffy could not have said if she felt horror, or remorse, or relief. In the silence that followed they could all hear his ragged breathing. 

==

They disappeared for a while, after that. The darkness and the black dog took Spike, and he spun between drunken violence and lethargy, smashing up demon bars only for her to find him sprawled out in the smouldering ruins, eyes flat, drinking straight from the bottle. 

She tried stability. She brought groceries into a quiet cottage and set them on the counter, got a job at the tea shop on the corner, bought him poetry books and pens and put them quietly on the table next to the bed. She braided her hair up, and played music in the house, and put soaps on the television. After two and a half weeks of tense, grim silence, she threw a plate at the wall above his head, and during the ensuing fight someone called the police. They left the next night, taking only the poetry books.

She tried violence. She took him to the Egyptian city of Alexandria to find a water god that made its home in already drowning beaches and streets and had begun devouring worshippers. The Internet had been alive with the stories – missing persons reports of beautiful, big-eyed young men, and hysterical excitement that the god Hapi had returned to flood the delta. What they found was a minor deity, little more than a demon, soaking in the swampy ruins of a shopping mall car park. Buffy killed it with a single throw of the scythe, furious, while Spike smoked moodily nearby and never even drew a weapon.

She walked out on him then, leaving him in a hotel in downtown Cairo, but as she paced the streets, taxis speeding past, she already knew she’d be back within the week. 

And so, four days later, she walked back through reception, paid the overdue bill to the agitated owner, opened the door on a room lit only by the television, took a deep breath, and began to talk to him.

==

While all this was happening, something began to build, and nobody had noticed yet.

As the world began to melt, and the seas rose, and cities choked, and the inexorable march of progress faltered, stories and gods and monsters began once again to pace around the edges of the campfire.

In Cape Town, where once they had helped a haggard, bearded, one-eyed Xander to bring down a vampire queen, the children and the old folks were telling a new fairy tale. The sun and the moon, cursed to earth, fighting side by side until the end of time.

In the little French town where he had touched her still-young face in the dawn light, the townsfolk still remembered their names, that they were just people. Even so, young lovers had taken to visiting a very old, nondescript statue of a couple in a street corner fountain and touching it, for luck and fidelity.

An abstract artist they had once saved from a demon attack, though neither of them thought of her again, became very rich on paintings of sunlight and darkness, of mirror-forms. She took to wearing a long, black leather coat at previews.

A surge in academic studies. Conferences and papers dedicated to the theme of Eros and Psyche, to the tropes of immortality and eternity. A reclassification of folk tales. Anthropological story-gathering expeditions.

This is the story of a story.

==

There were quiet years, to be sure. They lived for a winter up in the far, far north where the sun barely shone and revelled in the novelty of freedom from daylight. There were vampires, and they patrolled churchyards and kept an eye on what arrived at the docks, but mostly they rested, and slept, and discovered new things about each other. 

He spent whole days just touching her, quiet, their breath catching and sighing in concert with the flickering of the aurora, lighting the room an otherworldly green. He found new ways to make her gasp. Their bodies fit one another as they always had, but they found that now they knew they had time, some of the urgency was gone and they could move slowly, rising and falling like the ocean.

They found new things to learn, going for days at a time where the only sounds were his rich voice sounding out the words of an unfamiliar language, or her halting notes on the piano. “World enough and time, love,” he’d smiled, when she’d first asked him what he was doing, and although she’d scoffed at him, it hadn’t taken her long to get the idea. They were here for a long time, now – time enough to try it all.

The most wonderful moment of them all, though, was when he screwed up his courage, and with the words sticking in his throat and his eyes downcast, began to talk around in circles. She watched him for a minute, listening, then pulled a face, forcing a mumbling confession out of him that actually, he’d been writing some poems, and would she maybe want to read them?

==

They stopped going to funerals, after a while.

The first one to leave her was Giles, her chosen-father, her guide. She read a eulogy to a packed-out church in a misty village, full of damp tweedy jackets, darker shapes crowding in the corners, things from many worlds come to pay their silent respects. After the third night he had found her sitting in a dark room with the pen and blank paper in her hands, Spike wrote it for her, and she remembered nothing of what she said, her words falling raw from her throat without passing through her mind.

Then Faith, her dark sister, though there was nothing to bury. She’d gone with a wisecrack, gone down fighting exactly as she would have wanted, and Buffy said so as she laid a bouquet of wild roses at the stone marker. Robin followed soon after, her partner and onetime lover facing down a mob he couldn't handle without her, shouldn’t have even tried. A waste. 

When Andrew died, fifty years old but still in his prime, infuriating as ever, she noticed that some avoided her eyes. Nobody wanted to see an immortal at a funeral. The junior Watchers whispering together in a corner could have had nothing to do with her, but she felt their calculating looks like knives at her back and she held tightly to Spike’s hand with a sort of angry defensiveness. She’d looked for Willow, but she wasn’t there, and Buffy couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her.

“How did you get used to it?” she asked him, later, propped on one elbow in bed.

“Hm?” he murmured, idly playing with her hair.

“It’s, well... I haven’t had to think about it much, yet. Faith and Robin, they went down fighting, and Giles was always ancient, but Andrew – when did he get  _ old _ , Spike? Dawn and Xander and all the others I grew up with, I looked around at all their faces and I realised that, that…”

She couldn’t finish.

“You’re going to lose them all, and we’re going to carry on.”

She threw herself back on the pillow, stared at the ceiling. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

“I don’t know, pet. Before, there was never anyone I cared about who could die, and me and the family… Dru… I just thought we’d all go on forever. Then I thought I’d take care of you, and the rest, and then when you’d got old and gone where I couldn’t follow I’d just walk out into the sunshine. But now – I don’t know. I think we’ll just have to face them one at a time, just like everything else.”

There was nothing else to say, and so she turned over, and they curled up together. But it was a long time before she could sleep.

==

Willow was gone. She hadn’t been there to say goodbye to Andrew, but that wasn’t exactly surprising. She’d been wandering the worlds since the battle for Drusilla, returning every few months looking thinner and wilder, full of so much magic it was sparking in her hair. Buffy hadn’t feared she would give into the power again – the time for that was long past – but her grief and her anger, her aimless searching for purpose, could burn her up from inside just as easily. To have loved and lost once again...

They tried everything they could think of. The Fates could not find her, three blonde pageant queens passing a single eyeball between them and whispering  _ no, no, gone _ in a constant sibilant hiss. The Immortal, sitting in the middle of a web of contacts and obligations like an elegant spider, called out to kings and archons in every world he had ever visited, but none had seen her. No divination or location spell could touch her. As best as they could tell, it had been a year since she last left a trace anywhere.

Dead, then. She had died angry and lost and afraid, far from home. Buffy mourned her, and they planted a willow tree, near a river. When they next passed by the Sunnydale crater, she added a stone to the small cairn by the fence, and told Tara quietly what had happened. Spike mooched nearby, kicking at a can, and tried not to look at the great gaping chasm he had bought with his death.

==

The closest she came to losing him came about ten years after that. 

Eco-terrorists were nothing new these days, but the explosion that had shattered an  _ arrondissement _ of Paris down to the catacombs had to have been magically aided. The bones Buffy and Spike had found at the scene, blown up from the underground ossuary, had been carved with strange symbols that twisted the eye.

Their trail led Buffy and Spike to Rome first, where they found the detritus of magic in the tunnels under the Colosseum. Then to the subterranean aqueduct under Naples, where they fought a scaly deep-blue demon the group had left behind, a desperate battle hip-deep in the rushing water. A trap. They were getting closer.

They finally caught up with one of them in a bunker under Berlin. It took nothing more than a threat of violence and a glimpse of Spike’s fangs to get the boy crying and spilling his secrets. The group sought the Seed, the soul of the Earth, and they knew now where to find it; in a place called the Deep Well, or something like that…

Spike knew it. The two of them caught up with their quarry in the Deeper Well itself. The tomb under the Cotswolds was as it had always been – dim and endless, stacked with the remnants of the Old Ones. Every sarcophagus lining the walls held more power and rage than did all the demons on Earth combined; but it was still, and quiet enough that they could hear the voices of the gang of eco-kids echoing up the bore.

One level at a time, they helped one another down, one great coffin to the next, moving soft and quiet as they could. Buffy barely breathed; Spike did not. In no time at all they were positioning themselves above the little camp. They met one another’s eyes, nodded, and leaped.

The battle went quickly. In such cramped space, and where their only goal was to scatter the enemy, they fought back-to-back, perched precariously on the great sarcophagus. Buffy kept her face to the makeshift campfire, to guard Spike from it, and she was half-blinded and disoriented by the fire, and the chaotic flickering of torchlight, and the panicked shouting. She felt, rather than heard him stagger.

Her head whipped around to see him stumble. He was close ( _ too close! _ ) to the edge, a hand clutched around the wooden shaft of a crossbow bolt in his chest. He met her eyes, twisting to see her face as he fell, his face a mask of shock. Everything felt as if she were underwater. He disappeared from sight over the edge, slowly, in a dream.

_ stop, stop… _

She could not move fast enough. The air itself dragged at her arms and legs. The sound had gone dull, and echoing, and far away. 

She barely noticed as she stabbed the last fighter – little more than a boy – in the knee, and he crumpled. Her whole mind was screaming at her to  _ save him! _ and she couldn’t look away. She couldn’t look away from the empty air where he had fallen. 

Down, down, down, she vaulted, one step to the next, and careless of the yawning abyss of the well. Her breath heaved in her ears, ragged and frantic with fury and fear, and her head snapped side to side, scanning the walls of the tunnel for his body. He couldn’t have fallen far, and there had to be a body  _ there had to be, there had to. _

There! A shadow below, as she scrambled madly down, resolved itself into Spike, curved around the bolt in his chest. She let out a little cry, half-laugh, and he turned his head a little to see her. There was blood coming from his mouth, but as long as he wasn’t dust…

“Missed the heart, pet,” he croaked. “‘M not dead yet, or, well,” he coughed, “more dead. A crossbow – they must have known we were coming.”

She laughed, a little shakily, and touched his face. “Not today, hey? I’m not ready to say goodbye yet.”

His eyes never left her face.

==

They tell stories, in the hell-dimension of  _ dao’an uha- _ , of the slim pale-haired vampire who tricked and bribed and cajoled his way down the narrow, stinking chasm. Every  _ xrafstar _ has a story, though most of them happened to their great-aunt’s sister or the grandfather of the guy in the next pit over. 

All the stories tell how they saw him win a riddle-contest, or a bar brawl, or an arm-wrestle, and talked his way past a gate or won a key or the name of a demon who ran a smuggling operation two levels down. 

One demon handles a silver lighter, when he gets drunk or high, a thing from the world of men, and says that his nana traded for it from the  _ uttuku _ , the vampire, in exchange for a secret. He says that if she hadn’t, the family would be so powerful they’d live in the very depths – but everyone knows he is full of shit. 

They all say the vampire was dirty, or thin, or tattered from the snow and the wind and the constant, oppressive heat. All the stories mention the intensity, the frightening desperation in his blue eyes. Maybe he was trying to get to someone, down there at the bottom, they say.

There’s no need for them to tell the story of what happened next. The walls still bear the scars of the battle as the two of them came screaming up from the depths, the man from the stories and the woman he brought up with him glowing gold and silver together, brandishing weapons too bright to look at. A column of the lowest and most powerful trailed them, a twisting that seemed just inches from pulling them in, a roiling mass of darkness spinning behind them like a tail. They all heard the man laughing wildly, hollering out into the darkness. A lot of it sounded like swearing.

==

“It really is just us, now,” she said one day. They were searching, a little half-heartedly, for a key, combing through a concrete town at dusk. The sky was heavy with clouds, the sunset light a sickly yellow against it. Long ago, the town had been abandoned. Through an open window, the curtain flapping in the icy breeze, she could see the breakfast table set, the food rotted away to dust long since. The chairs had all been pulled out in a hurry – one was overturned.

“What’s that, love?” he said, looking over from where he’d been poking his head into a likely-looking building with flags hanging limp and official above the door. The poured concrete columns were probably meant to be intimidating, but here under this flat pale light they were just a little sad. She hadn’t spoken very loudly, but the town was dead silent. Just them, and the occasional stir breeze.

“Well, you know. I always knew it would just be you and me, fighting the good fight together – but it kinda snuck up on us, didn’t it? I just looked around and poof! It’s already happened.”

They carried on searching. They walked along a hallway inside the official-looking building (a town hall?), opening one door after another. Spilled across the linoleum tiles of the hallway, a great spray of paperwork had grown yellowed and curling, and they walked over it.

“And is that what you would have chosen? Just us?” he asked, after a long pause. Caution coloured his deep voice.

“Well, I mean, I never asked for any of this. But I’m no stranger to things happening to me, not being able to choose, am I? I don’t think I’ve truly been free since I was Called.” She pulled another door handle, poked her head in. Another empty office, dead fluorescent light, Formica desk. “Like you said after Andrew – one day at a time, I guess.”

She couldn’t see his face, ahead of her in the half-light of the corridor, but she heard the slight hitch in the heavy tread of his boots.

“But I choose you,” she said softly. “I wake up and I choose you, every day.”

“Every day…” she heard him say, rolling it over, as he opened another door. The sudden light from inside threw his face into sharp relief, and though he let out a little  _ ah! _ of discovery, she could see the pain there laid bare.

==

Here’s a secret for you: There are a lot more people than you think, who are here for the long haul – like, the really long haul. You wouldn’t notice anything different about them, slipping along a busy street in front of you, or sitting silently in the back of your taxi with the streetlights flickering over their face. They wouldn’t notice you, either. But they sure as hell notice each other.

They met Hob Gadling, the wandering one, waiting for someone in a pub in the East End. He and Spike got drunk, and, singing in the street, they tearfully agreed to meet again soon. 

Merlin gave them the answer to a question that they wouldn’t know to ask for another decade, the rangy, middle-aged man sitting cross-legged on the pool table in the echoey, linoleum-floored back room of a community centre in Newcastle, the fluorescent light making them look undead, all three. 

The Conduit looked at them, kindly but sadly and shook her head even before she pulled the tarot cards for them. Buffy began to glare at the sympathy, and laughed aloud a little vindictively as the cards spilled from her hands and sprayed out over the floor. But it was hard for Buffy to dislike the woman when she spread her hands, nonplussed and beginning to laugh herself, and said in her pleasant deep voice: “Well then, it’s all of them, I suppose…”


	2. Chapter 2

_White in the moon the long road lies,_

_The moon stands blank above;_

_White in the moon the long road lies_

_That leads me from my love._

_Still hangs the hedge without a gust,_

_Still, still the shadows stay:_

_My feet upon the moonlit dust_

_Pursue the ceaseless way._

_The world is round, so travellers tell,_

_And straight though reach the track,_

_Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well,_

_The way will guide one back._

_But ere the circle homeward hies_

_Far, far must it remove:_

_White in the moon the long road lies_

_That leads me from my love._

**_E. Houseman_ **

==

The thing about stories; they have their own life. They start as a whisper, a local folk-tale here and there, a superstition in a corner of the world. They spread outwards, thick and slow as spilled blood, growing in the telling until the furthest tendril of one reaches out to the next, and then, touching, suddenly they spread fast as forest-fire.

The rowers on the little trading boats up and down the tributaries of the Ganges picked up a new song, a call-and-response to keep the oars in time. The two voices of the song were a man and a woman, asking the other to stay by their side until the whole world burned.

As governments crumbled and cities drowned, a new trend for decorating pottery caught on in the upscale bohemian markets of Europe that clung to capitalism. It referenced the Greek tradition of painting with stories. There were quite a few that showed tales of lovers – that had always been true – but now the figures held a strange motif, somewhere between an axe and a scythe.

Their story was spreading, spreading...

==

John Arwood, the wizard-king of southeast Florida, sat his throne in the rotting Versace Mansion, waiting to receive the intruders. He ruled Miami with an iron grip, his short, vicious rise to power already legendary amidst the thousand warring street-gangs of the ruined city and the populace who lived in fear. The room was silent except for a constant _drip_ , _drip_ from the damp ceiling. One of his enforcers shifted a foot nervously.

The sounds of a scuffle could be heard, faintly, as the would-be thieves were drawn nearer.

“Oi, mate, that’s an antique! Hands off the leather!”

A woman’s voice. “Aah – get your paws off me, or else – _Spike!_ ”

There was a groan, of the sort most often elicited by a baton to the stomach, if not somewhere more sensitive. Arwood drummed one slim, elegant hand on the arm of the chair.

“Caught these two about to break into the vault, sir,” one of his lieutenants announced as they entered, dragging a pale man in black and a small woman with them. “He charged at us before we even saw them. Started yelling.” The small woman, a pretty blonde girl of no more than twenty, rolled her eyes. The man was still bent over, groaning.

Arwood’s hand tightened convulsively on the wooden chair arm, hard enough to draw splinters. The vault. None outside the building knew it existed, and none but his most trusted allies knew what he held inside. Not a problem; they hadn’t made it in. He calmed himself, was about to make his pronouncement – a good opportunity for a spectacle – when the whirlwind struck.

The two of them broke free in the same instant, fought bare-fisted, moved like demons. They seemed to read one anothers’ minds as they whirled and weaved. The woman pulled a baton from a guard’s belt and tossed it. The man caught it without seeming to look. One fighter, then another, fell swiftly. Not a one had time to pull a gun. Arwood watched, transfixed, unable to even draw breath to call more guards. 

They sprinted for the French doors, and the woman dived through without pause, the smash and tinkle of the glass breaking the reverie. As the man favoured him with a grin before following suit – victorious and utterly, utterly smug — Arwood reached his mind out, fighting through the panic. He grasped in his mind for the power center held in his vault, to blast him where he stood. There he found nothing but empty air. He felt the sickening, horrified swoop of his stomach as the realisation hit. _They hadn’t been on the way in..._

John Arwood, the first and last king of Florida, fell within a week.

==

When Angel asked them for help, the two of them crammed into a phone box in the pouring rain, Buffy rabbit-punched Spike in the stomach so he was bent over, gasping and breathless and half-laughing through it, unable to crow in the background as she said “We’ll be there,” and hung up the plastic receiver quickly as she could. She grabbed his hand to forestall the argument, and led them briskly through the streets of the Jewish Quarter in Krakow, heels clacking on the cobblestones that shone wet in the streetlights and the neon bar signs. 

They bickered a little on the sleeper train to Prague, fractious and unable to sleep with the light flickering fitfully overhead and the brakes screeching below, but they both knew they owed Angel a big favour after Drusilla. She thought that debt weighed heavier on Spike than it did on her. His jokes took on a biting edge, and his long fingers shredded the label on his beer bottle anxiously. After the decades they’d spent side by side, she didn't think he really felt threatened any more. Those kinds of feelings felt distant and a little askew, a memory from a foreign country. But with those two together, there was always something. Like brothers, probably.

It was lucky they were so close. They hadn’t heard from Angel in years, still traversing the worlds on his pointless quest when they left him last. They met him under the _orloj_ – the astronomical clock – in the town square. He cut an imposing solitary figure, tall and dark, all in black. The drama of it all made Spike roll his eyes, but Buffy elbowed him in the ribs; most of the time she forgot what they were, but this still gave her a little frisson. Three immortals, drawn together in the dead of night, the clock striking three, or maybe Jupiter. _Cool_.

Angel thrust his hands into his pockets, shuffled a foot. “Buffy. Spike.”

“Why am I here, Angelus? I was supposed to be going to a pub where they deliver your pint on a little model train tonight.”

Angel didn’t even rise to it. “Illyria’s gone away. She… she went.”

“She went? Uh, cryptic much?” said Buffy.

“Back to the beginning,” he said. Buffy and Spike shared a look, perplexed.

Angel did not elaborate. “I need to get somewhere, I can get to the dimension, but I need backup. Can you…?”

“Christ, are you still going with this? Honestly, I couldn’t care less– ” Spike gasped again at yet another elbow in the gut and a glare from Buffy. “But I suppose you’ve got me by the short hairs. Or she does.”

==

It happened so fast. Spike replayed it constantly in his mind in the years to come, torturing himself with the memory, and every time he watched himself lose her, he saw every opportunity he had to stop it. Sometimes when he dreamed, he saw it from the outside, and he could do nothing but scream at them both to _stop, stop_...

He had been sulking, a little, in the hot, dead world they traveled to with Angel. They were watching portals flickering open and closed across the flat desert, like lightning, waiting for Angel to finish his bargaining. This was the latest stop on his endless, pointless, stupid quest to release himself from immortality, to restore the humanity he’d walked away from not once but twice. The prophecy still held him so tightly, even after he’d signed away his rights to it.

As he so often did with her, Spike threw out a cutting remark, unthinking, and it flowered into a row. She bristled, shot back, and stalked away. The next thing he knew, they were nose to nose, snarling into one others’ faces once again.

“How could you say that? To want to give all this away–”

“I’m not– that’s not what I said. Spike, why aren’t you _listening_? I can see why Angel feels the way he does. Everyone I loved is dead, and it’s just you and me...”

“And you’re still the one who gets to choose that, aren’t you? Every day you choose still. What happens the day you decide different?”

He tried to take the words back as soon as he heard them. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again, her eyes widening in hurt. Ashamed, he reached a hand out to her in entreaty, but she snatched hers away and took a step backwards.

A portal flashed open around her, behind her.

His voice caught in his throat. She twisted to look, startled.

_stop, stop_...

And she was gone. 

==

After the panic and her pounding, violent heartbeat slowed and she’d got her bearings, Buffy could feel a pull toward him from the very first day. The worlds were strange, and hostile, this far away from the one she was born in, and she had nothing more than a knife in her boot and twenty dollars wrapped around her driver’s license in one pocket.

She stood on a long, empty road, white under the blank moon. The shadows under the hedges hung, silent and sharp. There was not a breath of wind. She could feel the dust, under her feet, and she had never felt so alone.

She knew it would be a hard journey home, back to him. She began to walk.

==

While the moment he lost her was preserved in his memory, sharp enough to cut in every detail, what happened next was a blur. Angel found him incoherent, beside himself, casting about the empty landscape for a way to throw himself after her. But there were more worlds than stars in the sky, and he could have waited there for a thousand years and never seen another doorway he could follow her through.

He certainly didn’t remember what happened after that, as Angel shook off his own despondency for long enough to knock him cold and drag him back through the portal, back out under the _orloj_. When he came to, the four figures around the clock face were striking the hour. Death, as a hooded skeleton, rang the bell, and the other three shook their heads _no, no, not yet_.

==

She passed through many worlds, trying to follow the pull, finding her way back home to him. 

She crossed a silent sea, flat as a mill pond, where the mist deadened all sounds except the dip of the ghostly rowers’ oars and the far-off, mournful cries of gulls. The cost of her passage was a true secret, and she dug down deep inside herself to find one, and it tore at her chest to give it away.

She bargained with a dark, dripping thing whose face she could not see, in the deepest sewers of a world covered by city, where the surface was shining and beautiful and green and the people were happy. It opened a portal for her, one step closer to home, and as she passed it it reached out for her with sadness and something like longing.

She ran through a world where the air was poison, and the towering black pillars of rock showed the claw marks and scrapes of some enormous beast. She didn’t think it could kill her – she didn’t think anything could – but the vapour burned her lungs and blistered her skin and she sobbed out loud with the pain, and ran onwards still.

She walked where all the gods who had ever been believed in lived, and she stepped small and quiet and kept her eyes downcast. She saw a wasteland of nothing but snow, where the sun and the moon both hung in the sky and nothing moved. She swam through a sea where enormous shrimp-like things shifted in the depths, just beyond sight. And in every world she kept coming closer, and kept following the pull to him, and in every world she left a little bit of their story, though she never looked back to notice.

==

And he was waiting for her. He and Angel stood beneath the great metronome sculpture in Prague, overlooking the city lights reflected in the swollen waters of the Vltava in flood, and he paced back and forth as it swung overhead, ticking the seconds. He held her scythe so tightly his hands were aching. He fucking hated Prague.

He half-heard Angel reasoning with him that, with Illyria gone and Willow long lost, dead in all likelihood, there was no way for them to go back for her. That Buffy would be coming home, not waiting there for him to ride in on a white stallion. That the best thing to do would be to find someone who could cast a lesser spell, tell them where she was, and if she was even still – well, Spike chose not to hear that bit. His eyes fell on the plaque at the base of the enormous, swinging sculpture. It read _In time, all things pass_.

Fuck that.

==

As she got closer, the pull got stronger, and the dozens of realities she passed through grew more like her own. They showed her the other side of her choices, even those she’d never known she made. Some nearly overwhelmed her with guilt and shame, and some were so beautiful that she fought a heart-deep desire to stay. It was only his tugging at her, hooked into her very soul and pulling, pulling, that let her turn her back. 

In a world where Dawn hadn’t turned away from all she could have been, where she never chose a mortal life, hearth and home, Buffy found her still young and beautiful. In the world where Spike was waiting, Dawn had faded away ten years since, surrounded by fat grandchildren who had not known Buffy as she sat with them in the hospital, her own heart breaking. This Dawn was happy, too, in a different way, and they greeted one another tearfully. Buffy did not ask what had happened to her other self. She stepped through a portal her sister opened for her, and in the glowing green light as it closed they saw the same expression on one another’s faces – pride, and sadness, and longing.

She met, and staked, a vampire Cordelia in a city she ruled over as queen. Buffy was strangely happy to see her. It had been fifty years or more since she’d thought much about her old high school rival, and from what she could remember, vampirism hadn’t changed her much.

When she saw Willow on her next step closer, Buffy felt a thrill. Her friend had been missing for so many years, was probably long dead by now, and none of them had ever been able to follow her trail. She hated to think of it, the witch dying alone and far from home in some strange world. When she saw a flash of red hair in a Sunnydale that had never fallen, she called out. Another might-have-been to tear at her heart, but she could not resist. She was surprised when the other woman’s eyes showed fear and confusion –- and not a little madness – before she opened a portal and fled. Buffy ran through after her, calling her name, but on the other side she was gone.

The hardest, the hardest by far, was when she found the world with her mother in it. Buffy called her 'Mom' again, and hugged her tight, smelling the familiar mix of washing detergent and warm perfume on her sweater. It was a good world. She felt safe there, so safe, and loved. If her mother had asked her to stay, had said a single word on it, Buffy wasn’t sure she could have left. But she held her mother, and cried into her sweater, and she thought of him. Then she straightened her back, squared her shoulders and dried her eyes. She said goodbye properly this time.

The next world felt almost right, and the pull behind her heart became so strong she felt borne along by it, like a river. She followed the tide, let it carry her. Her mind drifted along it, feeling nothing but the pull. After no more than an hour’s walk (or maybe it was longer, in her dreamlike haze) along a straight, dusty California road she saw the gateway she knew would be there. A little cry escaped her and she began to run. 

Before her – in an eyeblink – Illyria was there, ghostly, shuddering in and out of being, not ten paces away. Buffy had to struggle to focus on her, not to look through her to the portal behind, as she was carried inexorably forward by its pull. The god-king’s face was changing, flickering as it became softer, somehow more human, expression twisted in pain. The same face, but without its ageless cast, soft brown eyes replacing blue. The earth rumbled, and Illyria (was it still her?) lurched to her knees, insubstantial. The sky darkened as she reached out a blurry hand in pain. She looked like she was screaming, but there was no sound... 

This close to home, the pull so strong, Buffy could not have stopped her feet. How could she care about the struggles of an Illyria in this world, when he was close, so _close_ , and calling to her?

She kept her footing on the rolling earth, and stepped through the woman (barely Illyria now), writhing in pain. Buffy’s eyes were fixed on the portal. She was drawn forward, and the white light welcomed her.

==

If she had looked back, she would have seen the story she was trailing behind her like the tail of a comet.

Voices, raised above a whisper on a grey endless sea-world, for the first time in thousands of years. A rebellion on a vessel in the mist, paid for with a secret.

A dark, sad, wet thing in an endless maze of sewers, no longer willing to be the price for the happy city above, stretching up, up, toward the sunlight.

Dirty faces gathered around a campfire, drawn with hunger and fatigue, but shining with eagerness for the length of one more tale, at least.

A mother’s pride, threaded in with the sadness.

And in all the worlds she’d passed through, the story ringing like a bell; _She’s looking for him_.

Even the shrimp told of her passing.

==

It had been many years since Merlin told them what they didn’t yet know they needed, but Spike remembered, then. _Delphi_. The Pythia, he supposed. He wasn’t sure if the oracle lived, or if anything stood at the old city, or even if that was the right path. _Delphi_ could have been a department store in the Midwest, for all he knew. But that one word was all he had to go on, and so he went.

It was tricky to cross Europe alone when you travelled only at night. Drivers weren’t, as a rule, too keen on picking up a solitary hitchhiker at three in the morning, especially these days when so many were hungry and desperate. Even more so when the hitchhiker was pale as death itself and carrying a wicked-edged scythe, and that was before the headlights picked up the wildness in his eyes. Nevertheless, he got there; midnight train to Vienna, then another screeching, rattling sleeper carriage to Venice (no matter, it was not as if he could have slept). A boat, a bus, a good bit on foot, stealing blood where he could find it, and a week or so later he was walking into the modern town of Delphi as the moon rose over the warm, dying grassland and the cicada-song. 

There was something about a Mediterranean town at night. Between the fading heat of the day, and the stillness, and the white of the moon, he could have been nowhere else in the world. He spoke almost no Greek – his classical Greek was neither use nor ornament – but with the help of a phrasebook and the traditional practice of the Brit abroad (pointing and shouting loudly in English), he found his way to a bar. The football blared on a flat-screen television, a selection of middle-aged men sitting around it smoking cigarettes and not talking. He tried to ask the barman, wiping down the counter with a grubby rag, if someone could drive him down to the archaeological site. The man simply fixed him with a suspicious eye and grunted. It was only when he said “Pythia?” that the barman huffed and slapped his cloth down with an aggrieved air and rummaged in a bowl of slips of paper. He pulled one out, read it, and called out.

“Ioannis?”

“Nai?” One of the middle-aged men answered without turning his head.

“To vampír thélei na dei to manteío.”

The other man – Ioannis? – sighed at the inconvenience and scraped back his chair, gesturing to Spike to follow, managing to keep watching the football until the second he walked out the door. At a gesture, Spike climbed into the passenger seat of the man’s clapped-out Yaris. The two of them trundled down to the site around the hill in awkward silence, the landscape sharp and white in the moonlight. Spike drummed his hands nervously on his knees. He was surprised to see Ioannis climb out of the car (with a groan and a little grumble) and start plodding down the footpath to the temple site.

He followed – his input did not seem to be required, and his usual inane commentary had been quashed by the strange air of the night – and watched with incredulity as the man settled himself with another series of grumbles in Greek, _sotto voce_ , on a stone block in an open space. He could hear no other sound – they were alone with the crumbling columns marching away into the darkness and the ever-present cicadas. 

The two of them waited, for a while, in silence. Spike began to fidget.

All at once, the cicadas stopped singing. _Ah_ , thought Spike. The man’s head snapped back, his eyes staring, sightless and suddenly white. _Here we go._

“The Pythia, I pre-”

“ _The curse. The moon. The blood will run. Welcome, vampire._ ” The Pythia’s voice was a hundred women speaking at once. Ioannis sat ramrod-straight, head back, face blank, as the Pythia spoke through him. 

“Righto. Not much for small talk then? I need to-”

“ _You cannot._ ”

“What? Like hell, mate. I’ll do anyth-”

“ _You cannot. You must wait._ ”

Spike ran a hand through his hair, began to pace. “Wait? You must be joking. How lo-”

“ _You must wait._ ”

“Bloody hell. That it? Fuck you, then,” and he spun on his heel to go. As he stalked away, the Pythia spoke again.

“ _Three things you will need, when it comes to the end._ ”

He stopped, turned his head a little.

The Pythia told him.

==

He tried to wait for her, he really did. He worried that the bloody Pythia’s answer, vague in the manner of fortune tellers since time immemorial, had been a warning – that he needed to wait, or she wouldn’t come. But waiting had never come easy. He could maybe find a witch, find out where she was, right?

He broke, not even a week later, and tried to drive to a likely-looking seller of tarot cards and incense he’d found online. His rented car broke down a mile down the road. He banged both hands on the steering wheel, the horn sounding a sad little toot. The cars that were left were all shit these days.

The second time, the shop was closed. _Mediterraneans_ , he thought. Probably taking a nap.

He tried somewhere else. His wallet was stolen outside the store.

After the fourth time, he had to tear out of Delphi on foot with half the residents on his heels, the dawn not an hour away. He could have sworn he saw an honest-to-god pitchfork.

In Athens he got arrested by a militia on his way to meet a coven he’d emailed, and he had to flash his fangs to get away.

He couldn’t find a single witch in Budapest. _Budapest_ , for crying out loud.

By the time he got back to London, three wallets down, having had his backside kicked more times than he cared to count, and not having been able to get his hands on so much as a horoscope in that time, let alone a grimoire, he was starting to get the message.

_“You cannot. You must wait.”_

Times like this, he needed Willow. Most powerful witch of the age, could have fixed all this with a snap of her fingers and he'd be wrapped around his darling bird by dinnertime. All that skill, and incredible strength, and fury like he'd never seen, and she'd crawled off and died over a woman. Ah, but he knew love, didn't he? 

He didn’t know if the Powers That Be were just fucking with him, or there was somewhere else he needed to be. Either way, they couldn’t have picked a better trial.

_Fine. I’ll wait for her._

==

The story was starting to join up. Those tiny little campfires and hearthfires where people gathered to tell tales and keep back the dark the world over, they grew larger. As the story was told it grew, and changed, and sometimes the fire leaped the gap and twisted into great tornadoes, conflagrations of myth.

The time he rescued her from the hell-dimension became conflated with the old myth of Orpheus, a new story where the hero sent his bride to Hell himself by mistake, but when he brought her out of the Underworld he didn’t falter, didn’t look back, and they lived forever. It was told at a poetry open mic, and it was heard by an academic, and she codified it and logged it in a database where it stayed, trapped in static like amber, until the computers all failed.

The story of Drusilla’s death at his hands joined the story of the enmity he and Buffy had once shared, and the violence he’d done her one hateful, pathetic night, and were spun into one tale of half-truths and tragedy and shame told in the flooded ruins of old Jakarta.

In the worlds Buffy had passed through, the stories of the sunlit warrior searching for her lost lover began to reach one another, forming the beginnings of an epic, a story-song. But nobody knew how it ended; every teller made up their own. It had to be a happy one, didn’t it?

==

Trapped in their London safe-house, misadventure befalling him every time he left with the slightest idea of seeking her out (and wasn’t she constantly on his mind?), Spike figured out after two weeks of rage and cabin fever what he could do to get out. It took him another week to become desperate enough to do it.

Angel. The vampire was as much use these days as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest, but Spike knew he, too, had counselled waiting. If he went after the great sad lump, that would be the opposite of going after her, right? He _needed_ to get outside – for one thing, they only kept two weeks’ worth of blood in the freezer and he was starving.

The useless idiot had figured out how to use a mobile phone eventually, and most of the network in southern England was still functional. With few words – as many of them insults as he could manage – he called and arranged a meeting.

They met in Mile End. London after dark wasn’t what it had been, but England was still the only place to get a decent pint, and Spike had a soft spot for The Blind Beggar. The bullet holes from the Krays’ most famous hit were still in the wall, and the cheesy gangster tour groups had died out when tourism did. Angel was already there, slumped in a booth near the bar, when he arrived. Really looking at his erstwhile sire for once, Spike noted his blank expression, his unbrushed hair and tattered coat. _Shit_. This quest of Angel’s really was killing him, though not in the way he wanted.

Spike swung into the booth, propped his feet up on the seat opposite. “She’s alive.”

Angel glared. “Why are you here, then? ‘ _You left. I stayed._ ’ That’s what you threw in my face, wasn’t it?”

“I was… I was told to wait.” At the clear disbelief he read on the other man’s face, he added “Fuck off. I can’t go after her. Can’t find out about her. Everything goes wrong the second I try." He paused thoughtfully. "Unless, you could–”

Of its own accord, his pint glass shattered, good bitter ale flooding the table. Angel barely flinched, though his coat sleeve got a soaking. Several bar towels and a replacement pint later, Spike sat back down opposite, resigned.

“I see,” Angel said, picking at the label on his beer bottle. “How long?”

“Don’t know. Didn't say. Got all the time in the world, I suppose.”

“And if you did have to? Wait forever, I mean. Go on alone. You’d still want to carry on like this?”

Spike rolled his eyes, thumped his head back against the booth. This again. He addressed the ceiling. “I don’t know what this final rest is that you’re expecting, mate. Not sure about the pearly gates for the likes of us, soul or not. This is all there is for me.

"We've kept plenty busy, the last hundred years – what have you been doing? Traipsing around with Big Blue, and then chasing her off for whatever reason? Where’s that white hat gone you were always showing off?”

Angel only grunted. Spike couldn’t believe his own thoughts. Waiting was hard enough, but waiting – with _Angel_?

==

Turned out, they were stuck together as surely as they had been in LA. He had thought Angel in a depression was bad, but after Spike’s own hyperactivity and bloodlust had drawn them both, slowly, back into the fight, he remembered a self-righteous Angel was so much worse. They bickered like fishwives. They threatened to stake one another at least once a week. 

It was better when Angel walked out, when Spike could stay where he was and drink himself unconscious until he returned. Kept his mind off things. When Angel stayed put and Spike stormed off, though, it would only take a day or two until his every thought and plan turned to Buffy ( _Where was she? Could he find out yet?_ ) and he had to call Angel’s mobile because he’d got trapped in a motel room again, penned in by coincidence.

It got easier, as the years passed. He didn’t think of her less – there wasn’t a moment where he didn’t think of her small strong hands and the scent of her golden hair – but waiting became an action in itself. He was choosing, every day, to trust: in her strength, that she could return, and in her love, that she would.

==

She was so sure, when she thumped down on her hands and knees in the dust and knew from the very feel of the air that she was home, that she’d look up and see his face. She remembered still how he had looked, that first time she came back to him. She’d carried that memory with her on her years of searching, his eyes shining with love and awe, and before she’d even landed she was already expecting it.

He wasn’t there. There was no-one there.

She climbed slowly to her feet, disbelieving. She stood in the middle of a ploughed field, low leafy plants, the air warm and the sky cloudy. It felt like a storm was coming. The horizon stretched, wide, flat and empty, in every direction. She could have been in Nebraska or the Netherlands.

And worse – she could no longer feel his pull. It had taken her as far as it could. She was back on her own Earth, and she was just now beginning to realise what a big place that was.

==

He thought he could feel her, sometimes, on the wind. He’d be sat in a diner somewhere at the side of another cracked highway, Angel sliding money or a phone number across the counter in exchange for a tip. They’d be on their way to track down a rogue sorceror, or shut down a demon-egg trafficking ring, or investigating a report of a blue-haired woman wearing blood-red who’d left a circle of destruction a mile wide, and he’d feel something pass by him. 

It’d feel like there was someone just about to reach out and touch him delicately, just beyond his sight, and he’d know, just _know_ , that he’d turn and see her face. His head would snap up and around, and he’d begin to smile, but she was never there.

==

A wide-spaced ring of pick-up trucks and SUVs surrounded a small town grown from scavenged girder and timber in the shadow of Denver International Airport. Buffy squinted against the glare of the nearest headlights from behind a rusty, wrecked old sedan, trying to plot a way through. It had been a long time – too long – since a shaman in Detroit had burned a lock of her hair and told her Spike was in Las Vegas. He’d probably moved on by now. Getting onto Highway 70 was still her best way across the Rockies and toward her next lead. She’d been hoping to resupply and catch another ride at Boulder, where there was an outpost of the National Guard, but these guys were between her and it. These little wars for resources flared in the growing dustbowl of the American interior, hot and vicious, sputtering out just as quickly. A siege, it looked like, for generators, or farming equipment, or maybe guns. 

She could see a way around; some gullies to the north she could slip into and pass by unseen, but she’d have to pass inside the ring of cars to do so. _A distraction…_

The horn sounded on an 18-wheeler to the south, and its lights flashed twice. Buffy grinned. Launching the attack. _Neat_. She rounded the old sedan as engines and men roared, charging the town’s half-built walls and barbed wire fences. Screeching tyres threw up dust. Fists brandished hatchets and baseball bats, and the occasional gun. She’d have to cross the open ground and come close to the fighting, but provided they were all blinded by greed and the headlights of their trucks… She exhaled, steadying herself for the run.

“Get those useless pricks to the south end, Angelus you useless prick, they’re coming!”

It couldn’t be. It was. 

He stood on an overturned van just inside the wall, pointing, his hair, longer again and his own sandy-brown, blowing in the hot desert wind. A floodlight inside the town lit up his face, fierce with the joy of battle, and reflected from the blade of her scythe in his hand. He looked – god, he looked beautiful.

He swung, dropped down from the van, vanished into the town.

Buffy _ran_. 

She was vaguely aware of men fighting around her, of screaming and guns and the blaring of horns – but her whole world was focused like the point of an arrow into that empty space where he’d stood a second before. Her feet and heart were pounding, her breath coming in gasps. With a roaring in her ears, she leaped up onto the bed of a pickup and planted her foot on the back of a man climbing its side. She cleared the fence in a single bound.

When she landed, crouching, on the other side, her gaze went straight to him. He stood not twenty feet away, and spun at the movement, scythe raised, expecting an attack. Their eyes met, and she was so focused on him she could feel the sudden catch of breath in his chest. He straightened, slowly, as she did.

Buffy stepped down from the van and walked toward him, stumbling just a little. She felt dazed, unreal. She could not have torn her eyes from his even if she wanted to. Everything felt so clear, so sharp – she could have counted his every eyelash from here. 

His face glowed with wonder, and disbelief. When she came back to him the first time, she had thought she had seen all there was to know of love. It was nothing compared to the soul she could see shining now in his eyes. She stopped, her face upturned. She was close enough for them to touch. The battle raged behind her, silent.

“Buffy,” he breathed, “I…”

She touched his face. “I came as fast as I could.”


	3. Chapter 3

_Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—_

_Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night_

_And watching, with eternal lids apart,_

_Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,_

_The moving waters at their priestlike task_

_Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,_

_Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask_

_Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—_

_No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,_

_Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,_

_To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,_

_Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,_

_Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,_

_And so live ever—or else swoon to death._

**_Keats_ **

==

The reason stories breathe and move and bleed like living things; people need them. Stories make the world go round, they say, but the world was creaking to a halt, and yet they clung to the stories ever more tightly.

Their story had many names, many variations, all over the Earth. Simple names, like the tale of the lovers, or names like ‘day and night’, and ‘the bridge to the other world’. The names of the lovers were sometimes attached too, but they were never right; their true names were not the sort for stories.

As legends are wont to do, this one pulled parts of others into itself; tales of magic and the otherworld, and of dark things. Tales of triumph and disaster both. But the core of their story held, and the reason it held was because it had something people needed in these inconstant times. It showed that some things held forever, were steadfast. It showed that some things could be trusted.

==

They came together again like a landslide. At first, of course, they were frantic, hungry, savage – they hadn’t touched each other like this since their very first years together. They made love as if they were fighting. Caught somewhere between violence and tenderness, he held onto her fiercely, as if she might slip away again. She fell into him, drinking deep of his touch. She slaked her thirst as if she had been dying of it, lost in the desert. They spent weeks barely coming up for air, drowning, drowning in one another once more.

After the first crashing waves of their reunion broke in those first few months, their breathless passion slowed and they could look on one another with new and older eyes. He spent whole days mapping her form once again. Every hill, every delicate curve so familiar to him that he felt as if he could find his way home in the dark, and yet she had been changed by her passage, just as he had. There were new roads he had to learn, and he set about the task with a will, tasting the air of a hundred strange worlds on her skin..

Not all the changes were external. In so many ways they had thought themselves fixed, eternal, but she saw depths in him now that she had not known before. It was shifting, hard to focus on, but occasionally she would look up into his laughing eyes, or watch his beautiful capable hands at some delicate task, and – there it was. It felt something like safety, or trust. They had completed one another before; now he also completed himself. She felt no stir of anxiety at that, only her own wholeness, her own trust. 

Eternity. They were complete within themselves, and loved one another straightforwardly. They were more than the sum of their parts. They lay together, shining inside as if filled with light, or crystal; his eyes closed as she fell asleep.

==

They forgot each other once – a curse – and fell in love again in the meantime, before it was lifted. 

They won a crown, the two of them together, though they got rid of that as quick as they could manage. 

They killed a god. Not a vindictive, petty demon god, but a vast ancient power in another world, unthinking and innocent as a child in its destruction, and it thanked them as it faded away. 

They never married, of course – what could that mean to them now? 

==

Some things never changed; he never could stick to a plan. They had come to Western Australia to break up a factional war between covens, and the Conduit had asked them a simple favour: remove the possession which had been cast on a lieutenant on both sides. Each had the ear of their respective High Priestess, and between them they had whipped up tensions from the simmering resource scarcity and isolation into all-out bloodlust.

Buffy and Spike had agreed to split the job between them, planning quickly as the Conduit pulled power into herself, borrowed from one with the skill and strength to make them a portal across the world. 

“Once a day only,” the woman had reminded them, eyes distant and voice flat as her mind wrestled the power from its owner, “at midnight. I cannot borrow any more.”

No problem – they could have it sorted in twenty-four hours. A stealthy exorcism while the encampment slept, a bit of waving a talisman about, and then giving the demon a good old-fashioned Sunnydale stabbing; all in a day’s work for Buffy. After that, it was just a question of sorting out the twittering High Priestess and explaining the situation. She ended up spending most of the day catching up on her suntan. It was the middle of the night on US time, but she had been pretty much nocturnal for years, and it felt good to catch some rays without some idiot vampire running about under a blanket (which, she reflected, he was probably doing right about now).

When they dropped her off at the rendezvous point just before midnight, though, she found not Spike, but a clumsily written note, trapped under a brick. WE HAVE YOUR ASSOCIATE, and all the rest.

_Ah._

And now here she was, with the first glow of dawn in the east, perched on a mile marker on an endless stretch of flat road, already hot and bothered, and more dust than woman. She was not worried. She wasn’t. He could handle himself, and it was his own fault if he couldn’t manage ten minutes of stealth without getting his ass kicked. But he was more fragile than she – she remembered the Deeper Well – and she didn’t even know what a demon-powered gang of witches could even want to barter him for. The note had just said COME ALONE.

She wasn’t worried. She chewed a thumbnail, and watched the truck’s dust-cloud approaching in the distance.

When they pulled up across the road, she hopped down from the mile marker to plant her feet and heft the scythe threateningly. Someone ought to be playing that tune from all the Westerns. _Do ya feel lucky, punk?_ She fought a rising urge to laugh. 

She did, at least, until a warlock hopped down from the back, dragging Spike with him and holding a stake to his heart. She froze, raised her hands slowly. 

He was in a bad way. His cheekbone was split, and his nose was bleeding as if he’d been punched in it more than once. Those and the black eye were all she could see, but by the way he was staggering there was much more to it than that. His expression was equal parts pain, defiance, and embarrassment.

“Sorry I’m late, love,” he said hoarsely.

“What do they want?”

He nodded at the scythe, then winced as the warlock pulled him back and pushed the stake a little deeper. Some broken ribs at least, then. _Stay calm…_

“Seems there’s a shortage of power sources down here, along with everything else. Soon as they found out who we were…” He grimaced, apologetic. “But pet – don’t. You’re going to need that. You can’t-” He cut off at a twist from the stake. Buffy’s hands were shaking now, truly, and her grip on the scythe was sweaty.

He was still shaking his head a fraction, his eyes widening, but she ignored him. No question. She placed the scythe on the ground, backed away. The witch walked Spike forward past it, then removed the stake and in the same motion punched him, hard, in the side. He roared in pain, and fell, and as Buffy darted forward to catch him the witch had snagged the scythe and was jumping back into the truck, its engine already revving. _A hundred years, I fought with that_ , she thought dully, as the truck disappeared into the dust.

Spike spat out some blood, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “D’you know,” he said, conversationally despite his breathlessness, “I bloody knew you’d give it away. You shouldn’t have done that.”

She smiled a little. “Come on, idiot. It’s only an hour til sunrise, I’m going to have to carry you most of the way back, and you just lost me my best weapon.”

He tried to take a deep breath, but it only started him coughing. “No – love – you don’t understand. You need it. The Pythia, she told me the three things I’d need at... at the end.”

“And the scythe was one of them?” Buffy shrugged. “We’ll get the Oracle to drop us off in the camp tomorrow, get it back. No biggie.”

They returned the next night at midnight, and she kicked a few more asses than she strictly needed to on the way in. Spike was still healing, but he fought with vicious efficiency and none of his usual relish. He kicked in the door belonging to the possessed lieutenant; he’d made a beeline for the building, seemed to know where it was. Spike had the unmistakeable air of a man with business there. Buffy found him standing in the empty cabin.

She tried not to look at the contents of the room – an overturned chair, a knife, a stake, _blood_ – as he turned to her. “He’s gone. It’s gone. That’s...”

“Uh… what were the other two things?”

==

They searched, and searched, but it was gone. Not a loose end to follow, not a trail, nothing. They pulled up every broken-down piece of furniture in the camp, turned up no more than a small stash of cigarettes, which even the current situation couldn’t stop Spike pocketing with exclamations of glee. 

The other coven knew nothing of it. The witches there cast a locator spell; it took them a while to convince Buffy to give up a drop of her own blood for scrying. Nothing.

When they returned to the camp for a second look, they found – _nothing_. Not a camp, not a ramshackle collection of buildings, not a single tent nor a footprint nor a blade of withered grass. Just a perfect circle, half a mile across, scoured clean and flat. It shone like glass.

==

It was a quiet year, some time after that, and they had found a little peace and safety, a corner of the world where they could forget the storms raging outside. Willow fell out of the air and onto the table as they were having dinner.

Spike swore, and leapt to his feet, spilling his blood. Buffy rolled and came up fighting. It took them a moment to recognise her, a woman dead for decades. It was only Buffy’s shout that prevented Spike from punting the witch bodily across the room. As it was, he pulled his kick at the last second, overbalanced and promptly fell over.

Willow was… well, she was feral. Her eyes were wide, and her hair was long and tangled, and she wore a strange combination of clothes; an orange pair of workers’ high-visibility pants, a red Hawaiian shirt so large it drowned her, and a blue beanie hat. She was dirty, and she smelled of stale sweat and fear. She looked no older than when they had seen her last. Maybe forty, barely a thread of white in her red hair. In her face there was no recognition – just an animal panic. She conjured a flame in one shaking hand, still sprawled among the remains of the dinner table. 

Buffy raised her hands, speaking in a low, quiet voice, trying to calm her. She walked backwards, slowly, across the little kitchenette. Willow’s eyes still held no comprehension; her lips began to draw back in a snarl. Then a thunk – Spike wielding a frying pan behind her – and she was a sudden dead weight. The table went over with a crash, spraying shattered crockery across the floor.

Spike twirled the frying pan in one hand, looking shaken, trying for nonchalance. “That solves the immediate problem, pet. But it seems the vacation is over.”

Buffy didn't know what to say. Willow – alive? She wanted to laugh, or cry, or slap her silly. She settled for practicalities. “We can’t heal her alone, Spike. We’re going to need help.”

==

Something had gone wrong in New York, and they were needed. At first, it had seemed like an accident; an explosion of power in Coney Island, a great commotion, a woman, then smoking ruins, a place scoured flat and glassy. But after, things started to become _strange_. All over the city, reality was twisting.

He’d known these streets so well, once. They’d changed, in the last hundred-something years, but occasionally he’d catch sight of a familiar corner on the Bowery, and all his old swagger would come back to him, and she’d turn to him and smile. They weren’t smiling much, right now – as soon as they took the ferry into the city he knew there was something far terrible afoot. Things felt… _thin_. Even the air felt insubstantial, as if it could crumble away into dust if he knocked it too hard. Everything was a little too sharp and bright.

He’d looked to her, and from her face she could feel it too. He'd begun paging through his phone, looking for a contact who might be in the city. Persephone, perhaps, though she’d be packing her suitcase soon; it was getting colder. Or that strange little nest of vampires and demons he’d known last time he passed through with Angel, who were trying to go straight. Funny, that. Well, maybe he could do them some good – he had a feeling they’d be staying a while.

Horrible things bloomed in the dark of the city, damp and sweet like hothouse flowers, taking over subway stations. Buildings grew cocoons that burst open, releasing hordes of terrible many-winged angels into the sky with trumpets ringing. For weeks, Buffy and Spike rallied whoever they could find and fought it all, killing where they could, and saving who they dared. But from the first day they knew they were losing. The city was falling apart from the inside out.

When they heard about the darkness seeping out of Wall Street, she shouldered her sword and they headed out. Just another day, holding back the chaos, though in truth Manhattan was almost lost now. All those wonderful clubs he had once frequented around the Village – long-lost to tourist traps, of course – but now not even the bricks remained. So much murder and mayhem, back when that had been his _raison d'etre_. A real shame. They kept heading south.

What they found there seemed to stagger even his fearless girl. The street disappeared into solid blackness, the light cast by the streetlamps sheared off as if cut by a razor. He felt as if the world stopped, just there, right at the edge of the light, and there was nothing beyond but some great empty chasm. _So dark…_

The darkness yawned at him, drew him in. He swayed, feeling a little drunk, or sick with vertigo. Buffy looked at him strangely, and he laughed aloud harshly, sounding mad even to his own ears.

“Time to go,” she said, unsettled, and grabbed his wrist, tried to pull him away. He couldn’t seem to tear his gaze from the dark as it grew. That cliff-edge into blackness inched closer, and he felt a call, a pull, daring him toward it. 

“Come – _on!_ ” Panic tainted her voice, and then he tasted blood, and his head rang. She’d slapped him, hard, and his mind cleared a little. He let her pull him along, her hand warm around his wrist. He heard his boots thudding hollowly on the sidewalk as he staggered behind her. 

They were the last ones off the island, or close to. They dragged everyone they could find as they ran. At the bridges, the darkness stopped. They stood there, in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, for a long time, but nobody came out. 

==

Willow was with the Immortal. He was bringing all of his not inconsiderable resources to bear on the problem, calling in favours, and yet she still remained untouchable, violent and catatonic by turns. 

When they returned, she was thankfully the latter. The Immortal led them through his mansion, his smooth, cultured voice ringing in the halls as he described the steps he was taking to keep her comfortable. Spike trailed behind, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, scuffing his feet along the carpets. He chuntered a little under his breath. Buffy looked back and suppressed a giggle; he looked like nothing more than an overgrown teenager sulking on a family day out.

They paused outside the bedroom. The Immortal gestured Buffy inside gracefully, but held up a hand to stop Spike. “She needs quiet,” he smiled apologetically. Spike pulled a belligerent face, swallowed an insult, then spun on one bootheel and turned his back. Clearly he had decided the most dignified solution was to pretend the Immortal didn’t exist. Buffy smiled a little, but it died as she entered the bedroom. 

Willow slumped on her side on the bed, staring at nothing much. Her head turned a little as Buffy closed the door, but she didn’t sit up.

“Hey,” whispered Buffy, crouching at her side. “I missed you, Will.”

Willow didn’t respond. Her fingers picked at the bedspread, and her lips moved a little, as if she were about to speak. Buffy brushed a lock of hair back from her friend’s forehead, gently.

“You came home, right? Back to me, and Spike. I know you’re in there. You’ve got just a little bit further to go, before you’re all the way home.

“There’s something coming, Will. Something is wrong, really wrong, out there, and it’s going to get worse. I know you can feel it. If you can’t get home yourself, or for me, do it for everyone else, hey? There’s a big fight coming, and we need you. Remember when you said you wanted in?”

Just for a second then, she thought Willow met her eyes. But then it was gone; maybe it never was. After sitting there quietly for a while, stroking her hair, Buffy straightened up, wiped her eyes, and left.

==

First it was Angel, who rang them in the middle of the day, when they were both fast asleep. He was trying to put down the constant demon gangs, endless waves of them pouring out of Los Angeles after the city had fallen to a Hellmouth. Figured, that drawing him back into the fight would have also drawn him back to his namesake. _The ego_ , Spike thought drowsily, sitting up in bed next to a sleeping Buffy. But when he heard what Angel had to say, the insults died half-formed.

"Whassat – Illyria? Y’sure?" 

“Illyria was back, Spike. She came out of nowhere, flattened half a city block, melted it into a skating rink, disappeared again. She was in pain, I think."

"Melted? Like – flat, shiny?" 

"Sure, that's it... After she left, there was some serious trouble. Reality got unstable. Things went wrong. But Spike – I think Fred’s back too. Inside her, I mean. I saw her, I’m sure of it.”

Spike dropped the phone.

Reports came to them, next, from the Fates where they’d found safe haven in Madrid, and from Merlin where he still lurked in the bogs of northern England, and from what was left of the Watchers’ Council network, still protecting their occasional mayfly Slayers, disjointed remnants of the line. A woman, not quite fully there, was screaming in and out of spacetime, laying about her with wild jets of power, pressing the world flat around her. She was never there for long enough to follow, or speak to, or stop – but they all agreed she was in pain, and fighting. And what she left behind her… Reality broke where she stepped, and strange and terrible things burst through. 

They hadn’t spoken much about what Buffy had seen on her long journey home to him – some things were too painful or too strange. But she told him, then, slowly, about the Illyria she had seen right before the final door, and about the woman struggling inside her. She told him about how she had walked right through her, that the pull had been so strong. He listened, head tipped to one side, his eyes never leaving her face. He never said a word. She didn’t think she could have carried on if he did. It felt almost as raw, to live it a second time.

And then, because he was still listening, she began to tell him the rest.

==

The story still gathered pieces to itself; a snowball rolling downhill. The dark warrior was a poet, or a devil, or a knight; the light warrior was an angel, a wanderer, barely more than a girl. He had torn her out of heaven – no, she had pulled him from hell. They lived forever, or they were reborn every day at midnight. No, they’d come to each other already dead, and each died again for one another and the world; their third death would be the last.

Every time, a little different. In one, he had hurt her; she had hated him. Another, their lives ran in parallel long before they ever met, and they were born a pair. Yet another, they had been enemies for many ages of the earth, for so long that neither knew where hatred ended and love began.

It wasn’t the only story that was told, of course; old tales and new ran wild, and these days to tell a story was to push back the dark. People gathered, whether in the safety of their homes or in great camps around the edges of hollowed-out cities, to tell each other tales. They told each other about a king’s search for a holy cup, or a man in a suit of armour that could fly, or the Devil cursed to feel remorse and fight for the side of good. But they told each other about the lovers, too. Always the same, at the heart of it: light and dark, silver and gold.

==

When they returned to the Immortal’s stately home, there was nobody there to answer the bell-pull. They stood for a minute under the portico in the dim late-afternoon light, sweating in the heat, then she tried again. Spike rocked back and forth on his heels, attempting indifference. Buffy rattled the doorknob – locked – and then stepped back to kick it in, but Spike stopped her.

“Buffy, pet, don’t.”

_Huh_? She looked around, incredulous.

“Can I?”

She chuckled, then stepped back, gesturing an expansive welcome. 

Spike hopped a little on the balls of his feet with relish, before bursting the doors open with his full weight behind one steel-toed Doc Marten. The double doors ricocheted off the wall behind and almost banged close again with the force.

As soon as he barrelled over the threshold, though, Spike’s joyful whoop faltered. He was instantly alert, instantly serious, and as she hastened to his side, she felt it too. The air itself was buzzing, a teeth-rattling sound she felt as much in her gut as her ears. Her hand itched for her missing scythe.

He nodded up the magnificent central staircase. “Someone up there.”

As she climbed, she quietly unlimbered a long knife from her belt. He followed, backing up the stairs, watching their rear. She could hear the voices now, too, and as they got closer she could feel the hair on her arms lifting with the static sparking in the atmosphere.

“Wake him up, Angel!” A familiar woman’s voice, deep but sharp with panic.

“I… can’t...” Angel, shouting. 

Buffy crested the stairs, her head snapping right and left. _There_! Bluish light flashed from an open doorway and painted a flickering band across the carpeted hall. She sprinted for it. The rising wind caught at her hair as she came to a halt in the opening, knife held ready. Spike was at her back a moment later.

The room was at the center of a maelstrom. Buffy took it all in in an instant. Darkness crowded the corners, heavy, almost physical. Shadows pressed in around her. The curtains and the bed hangings flapped and ripped violently in the wind. 

The light came from the Conduit, whose eyes were glowing white. Shining, she was filled with it. She stood, rigid, at the foot of a four-poster bed, and her long tangle of hair was pulled into the storm. Willow lay tranquil on the bed, eyes open and staring at the ceiling, one hand picking at her sweater absently. Beside her, the Conduit’s spell-fire surrounding Willow and him together, lay a gangly, dark-haired young man Buffy almost recognised. He was convulsing violently. His shoulders were shaking and his legs were kicking and scrabbling on the sheets as Angel attempted to hold him still. The Immortal stood by the bedside, at a loss, his eyes flicking from one to another of them.

“Don’t hold him down, you prat!” Spike pushed past her, his coat caught in the swirling wind, and he tore Angel off the boy by the shoulders. In the same motion he picked up a pitcher of water from the nightstand and threw it in the young man’s face.

It worked, or something else did – the boy’s eyes opened, and his back arched off the mattress as he pulled in a horrid, rattling gasp and awoke. He panted, his eyes rolling wildly, and Buffy recognised him – _the wizard Merlin? But so young_ …

The Conduit slumped into a chair, looking sweaty and haggard, and put a hand to her head. The wind dropped, instantly, into nothing. Angel groaned from the floor where Spike had thrown him. The Immortal appeared smooth as ever, though even he looked a little strained around the eyes. A glass fell from a sideboard by the door, and all of them jumped at the smash. 

As Merlin’s breath slowed, he spoke between gasps as if hurrying to get the words out. “I was… in her mind. She’s overwhelmed… the chaos. Something is pulling it all apart. Behind the scenes – the structure of things – it’s failing. The planet, reality, it’s… it’s dying. Willow, she draws her power from the earth, and it's too… too used up to fix. ”

Buffy was at Willow’s side in a moment, kneeling, touching her face. “Is she fighting it? She’s so strong, she must be, right?”

Merlin heaved another great sigh, closed his eyes. Blood ran from his nose, and he tried to pinch it. “No, she’s– She’s lost. Been gone so long. Untethered…” His hand thumped down loosely to the mattress.

“Hello, Buffy… Spike. Did you kick my front door in?” The Immortal was regaining his composure, but Buffy ignored him, her eyes fixed on Willow’s face. She spoke in a low voice. 

“Will, come on, hey. You came back before, didn’t you, just a little? We know what you need now. You need to fight – you heard me. You’re the strongest of all of us – remember when I said that to you, all those years ago in Sunnydale? You’re more powerful than all of them…”

At the mention of Sunnydale, long-lost town of their childhood, Willow’s eyes cleared again, and she met Buffy’s. This time she was sure of it.

“Yes! Yes, Will! Come on, come home. Sunnydale, remember? All our friends. Remember Anya? Cordelia? And Oz, remember him? Best of all, Xander, Willow, remember Xander? He was so brave, he fought for so long, and we all loved him…” Buffy was speaking faster now, and Willow was holding her eyes.

She didn’t dare stop. “Come on, come back… you were so strong, then, you saved us all. We’re here now, we love you, come home. Willow, come back for Tara, remember her? She’s still here, like you said, in this world, the trees and the wind… it’s all here. Will, c’mon-”

Bit by bit, Willow’s face lost its slackness, and her eyes cleared. There was such pain there, now. Buffy wiped her own tear-filled eyes and laughed, half-disbelieving. Her friend broke her gaze, though – Willow’s head turned a little, and her eyes sought out Spike, who was bending over, trying to prop up the Conduit where she had passed out in the chair. He froze, crouched awkwardly, as he looked up and met Willow’s eyes.

“It’s nearly time, Spike,” said Willow, voice perfectly clear and calm. “You’ll need them soon.”

He set his jaw, nodded.

“Will? What are you saying?” said Buffy, her voice cracking.

“Tara, baby…”

And then she was gone, again.

==

_Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold._

There was no longer any denying it; events were coming to a head. The news that was left was full of stories, the anchors not knowing quite how to report them: great chasms opening in the earth, bleached-white, many-legged things hauling themselves from the depths to die on the beaches. The Black Sea went out and did not come back in, and there were strange structures on the seabed. And always, before it; the woman, the god, in pain, leaving behind her the chaos.

All over the world, people were displaced; some places were untouched, and some were wracked by disaster. It varied one town to another, and whole countries fell to calamity. The old boundaries, of rich and poor, those with power and without, began to break down. The chaos did not respect borders or bank accounts.

Not all was destruction; in Brazil, a rainforest grew where yesterday there had been only smoking stumps. The great fruit orchards of Thailand bloomed, and dropped their fruit, and then bloomed again, in the space of a day. Birds flew in great flocks millions strong, wheeling and turning without reason. Yet nothing was fixed, nothing could be trusted – and everywhere, war raged.

On the day the newsreader said, with a mixture of bemusement and wild fatalism, that astronomers were reporting that the stars seemed to be going out, Buffy switched off the radio and turned to Spike.

“Okay,” she said. “Let's go."

==

“The scythe, the sister, the seed. That’s what the Pythia told me, all those years ago. We’d need them – or I’d need them – at the end.”

They’d begun to gather allies at the Immortal’s mansion. Some were there with them now. The light outside was harsh and orange-red that day, and inside the cavernous kitchen it reflected off the metal and the glass, and rendered all their faces beautiful and ageless and desperate. Everyone was still. Buffy sat on the countertop beside where he leant, her leg pressing against him. 

There were some familiar faces, some he hadn’t seen in decades – demons, gods, immortals. Whistler was there, the little prick, and Groo, and three Slavic women he was sure he’d met before, out in Chicago. Angel had brought his people too, then. He could smell humans around as well – a small army of brave, stupid souls had marched out of the night not two days since, a ferocious young woman barely five feet tall at their head and an old man at her side. Something was drawing them all here, to fight.

“So we need some help,” took up Buffy. She hopped down from the counter. Striding back and forth, a general addressing her troops, she looked comfortable there. They often fought alone, but she had always been at her best with a team, Spike thought fondly. He sneaked a look at her bum, too.

“The sister. Is there anyone here who can open a portal to a specific dimension? There’s someone there I need to talk to. We need a locator spell, or something, for the scythe, too. And this seed thingie – for that I need a clue. Anyone?”

Whistler piped up. “Could be the Seed of Wonder, kid. They call it the soul of the Earth – would fit our present pickle just right. They say it birthed the world, or maybe it’ll grow the next one. One little hitch though, nobody knows where it is. Or, it could be the Aglaophotian Seed, an artefact of-”

“ _We_ know where it is,” interrupted Spike. 

“The soul of the Earth… yeah, I remember. It won’t be quiet,” said Buffy. “Not with the whole world going loco the way it is. That place is an apartment block filled to the top with the Old Ones – they’ll be getting antsy. We’ll need protection.”

“The Deeper Well. I hate that bloody place. Almost as bad as Prague.”

==

The Well was restless. At first glance, it appeared nothing more than it ever was, the endless bore silent, glowing with a dim light that came from everywhere and nowhere, stacked with row upon row of sarcophagi. But from the corner of the eye, great and terrible things paced at the edges of the imagination, and Spike’s chest thudded hollowly with terrible drumbeats that were both there and not-there, asynchronous rhythms that felt savage and otherworldly. The world was thin here, and Spike could feel it twisting, reality trying to pull loose. _Bloody unnatural._

They kept still and quiet. They had a protection spell, of a sort. Buffy glowed – more literally than usual, beautiful thing that she was – shimmered with a golden-white light, hard to focus on. From the way her eyes kept sliding away from him, he looked the same way. But they couldn’t make a sound. Disguise only went so far. Still and quiet.

Step by step they helped one another down the well, clambering from one coffin to the next. It had been the better part of a century since they had been there last; and had the eco-kiddies been right about it all, he wondered? Thinking of that night, he remembered the moment he had thought he was about to die – the horror of it, the deep aching tug. _I don’t want to go_ , he’d thought, and as he turned for a last look at her face, _said I’d never leave her…_

They couldn’t speak, but as they traversed the sarcophagi, heading down for the Seed, she reached back and squeezed his hand, her fingers warm around his. The drums thundered on.

==

With the walls so thin now, and so many of the powerful of the world gathering there with them at the centre of things, the Conduit could steal what she needed. She pulled on many, all of them there at the mansion, and straining at the limits of the borrowed power she opened them a tear carefully, so carefully. Things were fragile now.

The gap was small, and Buffy stepped through side-on, Spike following behind her. It opened onto a room in another world, though there was only one reason he could have told it from their own. There, in the middle of the room surrounded by a crew of hard-bitten warriors, a hand planted on a table full of maps, the other gesturing authoritatively, was-

“Hello, bit.”

Dawn’s big blue eyes widened, and her rapid instructions cut off mid-word. She simply stared at him, mouth a little open, as the gathered warriors turned around to see what had drawn her attention. One reached for a weapon, but she raised a hand without looking and he stopped at once. She was so _strong_ here, so beautiful – he felt the pride and the loss clutch at his chest at the same time, feeling almost like a heartbeat.

“Spike? And ...Buffy? Is it- are you-”

“Hi, Dawnie,” said Buffy, smiling sadly. “It’s me again. The me who came through before. And this…”

“This is… he’s yours? You found him in the end?” 

“Alive and kicking,” he said with a smile, “much as a dead man can be. You look… you look good, niblet.”

She reached out to touch his shoulder, gently, as if to test if he was real. She was tall. He’d forgotten she could almost look him straight in the eyes. She looked exactly as she did, etched in his memories, that day she walked away from immortality.

“They tell stories about you two, here,” she said, half to herself.

He held her gaze for a moment. He felt fixed to the spot, didn’t dare to speak. His voice felt choked, too big for his throat, his chest. He nodded wordlessly to Buffy, who touched her arm and began to talk. She was not their Dawn; their Dawn had chosen her happiness long ago. But here there was a might-have-been that broke his heart, a little.

He looked at them, his girl and the might-have-been, together. They’d come to ask her a favour, and as he watched them exchanging information, talking quickly and efficiently now, straight to business, it hit him. He’d always known Dawn was part of Buffy, flesh and blood and heart, but in this world without her – she’d become her.

As he and Buffy left without her, having made their agreement, he wondered what had happened to them, there. He hoped they’d gone down together.

==

The seed, the sister… but they couldn’t find the scythe.

They tried everything, scoured everywhere. Location spells slid, or sparked and fizzled into nothing. Spike and Buffy turned over hideouts, followed up connections, threatened demons. They offered rewards, put the word out on fragmented demon undergrounds the world over. They tried to buy every mythical axe, sword and scimitar they could find on the remains of the dark web. Time and again, nothing. It was destroyed, or changed, or not in their world any longer. They grew ever more frantic, but time was slipping away from them...

==

Willow slept, mostly, or whatever you could call her staring, mumbling reverie. It broke Buffy’s heart to see her that way, this terrible, powerful woman reduced to a shaking wreck; Buffy could bring her back to herself, convince her to fight against the torrent of instability and chaos that overwhelmed, but it only seemed to bring her more pain. And, without the scythe, they had nothing to give her. They weren’t ready. Buffy felt a horrible sensation when she thought of that, a swooping pit in her stomach – had she done wrong, when she traded it so easily?

What other choice had there been, though?

They were spending another fruitless afternoon gathered around the large table in the Immortal’s echoing kitchen, the spotless marble surface totally obscured by maps, laptop computers, mouldy old books, and empty beer bottles. Spike had valued that last more than blood, she thought – it had been a long time since he’d so much as seen a beer, but the Immortal’s cellars were still well stocked.

The two of them, with Angel, Whistler, the Immortal and a handful of others, were trying desperately to come up with another way to the scythe. The suggestions were getting a bit ridiculous, now – she was almost tempted to suggest the hummus – but they had tried everything! Her mind skittered around the idea; was it already over? How had she missed her chance? It wasn’t meant to go this way… _not fair!_ From nowhere, she thought of Giles. She felt his loss, deeply, just then.

They’d argued themselves back round to where they had started when Merlin barrelled into the room, all elbows and long legs, tripping over his own feet in his haste.

“She’s here, she’s awake,” he panted, bent over with his hands on his knees. “She wants to talk to us all, now, right now, come on…”

“She came back on her own?” said Spike incredulously, but Buffy grabbed his hand and his question was cut off with a slight _urk!_ as she yanked him into a sprint. Why did this place have to be so damn big?

She made it to the door of Willow’s room first, the rest of them piling up behind her. In the room, her friend was sitting up on the bed. She was paler even than the vampires, and rail-thin besides, but she was lucid, and solemn as the grave.

“Will…” said Buffy, slowly. “You’ve come back to us. But it’s not time yet, we don’t have-”

“It’s past time, Buffy. Whether you’re ready or not, it’s coming. Listen closely, I can’t,” she shuddered violently, “I can’t hold on for long. Two more nights, at most…”

As Willow laid out her hard-won plan, they all drew slowly into the room, listening, frightened and determined. Buffy took Willow’s hand, sat on the bed with her, held it gently as she spoke and her voice grew hoarse and strained. She held on for just long enough to tell it all. 

To succeed, now, was almost as bad as to fail. The victory Willow offered here - it tasted bitter indeed. _Back to the beginning_ , Angel had said, once… 

They all left the room in silence. 

==

The Immortal headed straight for his wine cellar, broke off the neck of the bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafitte that had once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, poured himself a large glass, and sat back to remember.

Whistler walked down through the grounds, out to the river at the bottom of the meadow – sad, dried up thing that it was – and kicked a few stones, and thought about Arthur, and about Bussa, and Zenobia, and Washington, and all the others before Angel, and wondered if he’d done right.

The Conduit did what she rarely did, and made the necessary preparations, and borrowed from the future. Her eyes clouded, and none but her could see what she saw, but when they cleared she cried for a little while, and then got up and went in search of a warm and willing companion to spend two nights with.

Merlin, looking younger by the day, caught Spike’s sleeve on the way out of the room, asked him where he’d found out what they needed. Spike’s frown, and one-word answer – _Delphi_ – seemed to satisfy him, and he nodded sagely as he left, repeating it to himself quietly.

And Buffy and Spike? They left, hand in hand, and without saying a word to one another they returned to the room they’d claimed for themselves, and drew the curtain, and locked the doors. They loved one another in a way they’d almost forgotten; reckless, and frantic, and live-giving. He touched every inch of her, aching to hold it all in his mind, gather her up safe, perfect and eternal. She tried to lose herself in him; to stretch the single seconds out into forever, to hold back the coming hours on the strength of his love and wanting alone. 

They moved as one, clung together like the last two survivors of a shipwreck, and yet the minutes ticked on.

==

As evening fell, Spike found Angel sitting on the front steps of the enormous house. The sunset was beautiful, fiery orange-red and purple. Three years after he was turned, a great volcano filled the skies with dust the world over, and when he’d watched those sunsets, clouds like blood, he’d thought it was a taste of the end. _Funnily enough…_

“Spike. Got a cigarette?”

Spike parked himself on the steps without a word; one higher than Angel, naturally. He held out one of his precious remaining smokes, tried not to wince as Angel took it. Passed over his faithful Zippo.

They sat in awkward, companionable silence for a while. Spike drew on his own cigarette, flicked the ash out into the dirt where there used to be a lawn.

“Do you think you were right?” asked Angel.

“Usually. What in particular?”

“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. When Buffy went away, when you were… waiting… I stopped looking for the end. Because of what you said.” He smiled wryly. “And here I’ve found you’ve brought me to it anyway.”

“Neither of the options here are the end you were looking for, mate. If we fail, with the work your mate Blue has been doing, all the lights go out. None of us were ever here. And even if it works…”

Silence, again, for a time. Spike flicked his tab-end into the bushes, began to stand.

“I think I brought us here, in a way,” said Angel, almost to himself. Spike lowered himself back onto the step warily.

“How’s that, then?”

“When she left, she was tired of the search. I’d spent decades pursuing humanity, telling her why it mattered to me above all else. Every time she wanted to give up, I’d tell her again what it meant; warmth, love, rest, home. The last thing she said to me: ‘ _I’m going back, to the beginning. I don’t understand it._ ’”

“And Fred’s in there with her, now,” said Spike slowly.

“Was she trying to understand it? Did she go back, to the beginning of it all? Or was she trying to go back, to just before I signed it away, when she burned out Fred? I don’t know, Spike. I don’t think this is what she intended, but… I think she might have got what _I_ wanted." He laughed, bitterly. 

“None of us get what we want. None of us chose any of this. We both said yes, to that first bite from our ladies, all those many years ago, but I never… ”

“Whatever happens, we can stop her. And no matter what Willow says, we’ll find a way to save all this. There’s always a way.”

“Manchester United and the dog racing are already gone, though. I think it’s farewell Leicester bloody Square either way.”

Angel looked at him quizzically, but said nothing else. They sat and watched the last of the sunset, the blood-red fading slowly to black.

==

The night was hot, and close, and so, so quiet. A storm’s rolling in, thought Spike, and he was right, he could feel the thunderheads building up there in the dark, miles high and poised at the brink of violence. The air was full of electricity. The wind buffeted them, but not a drop of rain fell. 

They’d been putting the word out, and everyone came. You meet a lot of people in a few hundred years, and the older you get the more of them just keep sticking around. Every one of their allies, there at the mansion, called in every favour they’d ever been owed, and the word got around, and the whole night through cars pulled up, and portals opened, and humans and demons, minor gods and faceless things alike poured into the estate to answer the call.

Angel greeted a clan of Ano-Movic demons with a solemn bow, and they gathered round to clap him on the back and shake his hand vigorously. A woman-thing with spindly-long arms and legs scrambled out from under the earth right in front of Spike, making him start and yelp and curse under his breath when Buffy laughed at him. In the voice of an Irish grandma the thing asked him, polite as you like, to find her a cup of tea, and he saw nothing for it but to go. Persephone blinked into being, bringing the scent of gardenia and peaches and good rich soil with her, and she and the Conduit embraced like sisters.

The Immortal welcomed a delegation of Lords of some hell dimension. Buffy eyed them sceptically, but as far as Spike was concerned a favour was a favour. A beautiful snake-woman glided regally through a portal, and asked after Willow, but he could only say that she was gone again, lost in her personal oblivion, fighting. Even a helicopter, struggling to the ground amidst the wind,disgorged several military-types bristling with weaponry. Just the sight of them made him shiver, but they were not the Initiative he had met fifty, or seventy, or a hundred years ago. And they needed all the help they could get.

All through the night they came, and he couldn't shake the feeling it wasn’t going to matter.

==

They stayed awake through the night, of course, but found themselves unable to sleep as the dawn came close. The two of them wandered, restless, patrolling the palatial grounds of the estate. Spike talked endlessly, one story after another, hundreds of years of cities and battles and wry observations piling up, each bleeding into the next. Buffy listened, silent. Everywhere they found campfires, groups telling stories, or passing around an unlabelled bottle, or crying quietly.

Not all was despair, or maybe it was – it seemed they could not pass a stand of trees or a wilted rose garden without hearing the quiet gasps and sighs of some desperate coupling. Not long after they had practically tripped over one of the Fates wrapped around a hedge-wizard under a hedge (she seemed to have gotten hold of the single eye), Spike cocked an eyebrow at Buffy and, smiling, attempted to pull her into a copse of their own, but her mind was too restless and distracted for sex. She felt like she was looking for something, she knew not what.

Finally, with the sun peeking over the horizon and the pair of them still unable to settle, the daylight forced them back indoors. The mansion had enough rooms for a good pace, though, and she’d just worked out a circuit when something from the group of humans gathered by an empty fireplace in a small, high-ceilinged sitting room caught at her ear.

“...immortal lovers…”

Buffy almost stopped – were they _gossiping_ about them? – but it was clear after another second from the cadence of the speaker’s voice that he was just telling a story. It was the older man, the one who’d arrived at the right hand of the woman who led the small army of humans. A strange bunch surrounded him – a couple of his crew, a Carnyss demon, two djinn, some kind of demon half-breed, and Whistler, arms folded and leaning back against the wall. He smiled at her, though his expression was strange, too, completely unreadable. Buffy shook her head and paced on. Spike was quiet for once, deep in a blue study at her side.

Yet another circle of this damn house, and she was starting to feel trapped. They had all day to wait, until the appointed time, and at the thought of it she felt an urge building inside her to scream, or to smash one of the ugly vases the Immortal kept on plinths around every corner. Maybe she would, next time she passed it. _It’s not like it will matter…_

They passed back through the sitting room. Nobody turned to look at them as they entered, caught up in the story. Buffy was almost through the door at the other end when she heard what the old man was saying this time.

“She searched for him for a hundred years, and…”

Buffy paused in mid-step. Spike shook himself from his reverie as she halted. She stood facing the door, and turning her head slightly, listened to the man’s story. 

“They say she journeyed through a thousand worlds to get to him. She travelled through worlds populated by angels, and worlds filled with poison, and worlds where everything looked fair but felt foul and all around was betrayal. She saw worlds that might have been, and saw her sister and her mother returned from the dead to her, and she left them behind and searched on…”

Buffy and Spike met each other’s eyes. She frowned, laid a hand on his arm. He looked at her questioningly, but followed her to a small loveseat by the door, far back from the fireplace. They sat, and as Spike listened, paying attention now, she saw dawning comprehension, incredulity and amusement on his face. He started to say something to her, but she stopped him with a raised hand. Who was this man _,_ gossiping about her like this? 

She listened in disbelief as the old man, sat by the dead hearth in his checked shirt, with his pipe and his tin mug, spun a tale of her own return to the world, and of their reunion. It wasn’t right, not by a long shot – she was pretty sure she had at no point befriended a talking animal of _any_ sort – and as he wound up his little story, she drew an indignant breath to ask who he’d been talking to, and why he was telling these strangers her business, to embarrass him with her presence-

“Buffy, wait,” said Spike, under his breath. She turned to him, startled.

One of the djinn spoke up. “Have you ever heard the one where he sent her to the underworld by accident, and broke open all the doors of hell getting her back?”

“Naw, everyone knows that one,” said the other. “And you always tell it wrong, anyway. I like the ones where they’re together, you know? The one where they killed the kraken for the old emperor, or something. Or a funny one. Or one that could almost be true...”

“They’ve been telling stories about the lover-gods forever. I first heard the kraken one from my granny,” said the Carnyss demon. “Has anyone got any new ones?”

“My brother wrote a song about them being in New York, when it fell…” said a young woman, quietly.

“Hey,” said the old man. “There are a lot of good people here who lost someone in New York. Don’t you go making up fairy stories about it. It’s too soon.”

Buffy’s mouth hung open. Spike sat back suddenly, propped one booted foot on the edge of the sofa. He looked like he was settling in. She turned to him, incredulous, to see him looking extremely satisfied and thoroughly amused, his tongue between his teeth.

_Oh god_. _Oh my god_. This wasn’t gossip about them, it was... a myth? 

She felt hot, embarrassed, looked about to see if anyone had noticed her. Whistler was looking straight at them as Spike grinned from his near-horizontal sprawl on the sofa, and Buffy turned bright red and looked defiantly back. He tipped his horrible hat to her and left.

She didn’t dare leave while they were speaking, in case one turned to see them and somehow put two and two together. She knew Spike would put up a fuss, maybe even say something – oh god... Instead, she sat there practically curling with embarrassment, trying to sink into the sofa cushions, as Spike puffed up more and more with every word and the little group at the fireplace began another tale of the endless, ageless warriors, their holy quest and their sacred love.

==

Later that day, in the dim light of their bedroom, he was tracing the lines of her body with a finger, hardness and softness together, and teasing her quietly about their new-found role as fairy-tale heroes. She was mortified and cross and secretly gratified by turns, and he was laughing, and pleased.

When he began extemporising a section of epic poem, largely themed on the mythical warrior-queen’s inability to handle her drink, she made as if to get up, though by now she was laughing herself. He grabbed up at her, swung her back down into his lap. All at once he was serious, pressing his forehead to hers, kissing her gently.

After a minute, he pulled back a little. “Ah, but we had a good run, didn’t we, pet? The kind they tell stories about...”

“How can you think that? This can’t be it – it can't. Say it.”

“What do you want to hear?”

Buffy cast about, disconsolate. “I don’t know! Say that we’ll come up with something, that we’ve got out of worse scrapes before, or…”

“Have we, though? This feels different. The whole world’s burning and falling apart. The old girl’s used up. We can't go back to the way things were, not when we can all feel that the skin of this world is rotten ice barely an inch thick, and cracking as we're standing about on it. Red’s plan might work, but.. “

She bit her lip. “But the scythe.”

“There's no need for it. Willow’s said nothing about it.”

“Spike, I've been fulfilling prophecies since before I ever laid eyes on you. They don't say this stuff for the fun of it.”

He pushed a stray lock of her hair from her face, gently. They were so close together, speaking quietly, urgently. “The first prophecy about you, you twisted it about, didn't you?"

“I thought you said this one was different?”

“I don’t know, love. There’s times I thought I was dust, before – the Deeper Well, and Sunnydale, and Australia. There’s many a time we thought the world might be doomed too. Used up like this, I can’t see a way to live past it. I don’t want to stay here, but I don’t want to leave this rotten empty world that has you in it.”

There was a long pause. Everything was quiet in the house. The room was dim.

“Do you want me to tell you about heaven?”

He laughed a little, bitterly, recklessly. “I don’t think that’s for me.”

She scoffed. “Are you kidding? I remember what you told me once, when I thought it was all going to end. At Sunnydale, before you ...left.”

“I’ve still been around a lot longer than you, so don’t try it.”

She smiled gently. “A hundred plus years… There’s one thing I’m sure of, Spike. That you are a force for good, stronger and more powerful than anyone I’ve ever known. And there is nowhere – _nowhere_ – I would go that didn’t have you in it.” That last she said a little vehemently, and her fingers tightened painfully on his shoulders where she held him.

“Heaven itself would tremble before the wrath of Buffy Summers. Ah, love. Let’s go find out, shall we?”

==

The flicker of green presaged Dawn’s arrival, and Buffy knew it was time. They were assembled on the portico, under the majestic stone porch, at twilight. The grass was damp, the air hot and heavy, and it was silent. The birds had all long since fled. There were no clouds, but nor were there stars. What a night for the end of the world. She heard, in her head, the litany, repeated over and over, listing what they needed, the one thing they didn’t have. _The scythe, the sister, the seed..._

Willow was seated, cross-legged, on a mat with her back to the boarded-up doors, and she was lucid, though looking haggard beyond the telling of it. The Seed, the core of the whole plan, rested gently in her lap. Their ragtag army formed a loose ring centred on the manor, though there was no organisation – they stood talking quietly in groups, or pacing back and forth alone, or meditating silently. The air was so thick with waiting she could barely stand it.

A flicker, a silent tearing, and the other-Dawn, the might-have-been, stepped through, walked up the steps to them. She didn’t greet them – what could they have said to each other, knowing what was coming? – and instead, spoke quietly to Buffy. “Are you ready?”

Buffy, standing by Spike, drew close to Dawn and gripped her fiercely by her upper arms. “You remember what we agreed?”

Dawn nodded, her jaw set, though she looked about to cry. “You’re not her.”

“And you’re not _her_ either. This isn't your story. It’s not your ending.”

“I wish I knew it. The story, I mean” said not-Dawn, wistfully. “I want to tell them all, about you, and him, and…”

Buffy smiled, chucked her little sister under the chin.. “Make up something cool, won’t you?”

She pressed her forehead to Dawn’s, briefly, a hand to the back of her head. Then she stood back, took Spike’s hand, raised her chin. _Let’s go._

Not-Dawn nodded to Spike, drew a knife, raised her hand, and without so much as a blink sliced down her palm. The blood flowed.

“Open all the doors...” whispered Willow, quietly, from the ground. The earth began to shake. Spike looked, uncertainly, up at the stone roof above them. Reality twisted. Things began to push through. Buffy remembered a tower, long, long ago.

Dawn looked at them sadly, and then turned, opening her own path as she did. Not another word, and like a green flash on the horizon at sunset, she was gone. 

==

Buffy had seen war before. She’d been down in the thick of it, in the crunch and the flash and the thunder, a hundred times, had known battle while she was still a child. She remembered the sharpness of it all, every line and colour bright and clear, every sound close. She knew about the cold anger, the fear, the adrenaline, the sheer unparalleled rage, life and joy and panic and death all rolled up into one.

This was the last war – she felt it deep in her bones. She took the blood-lust into herself, felt it coursing along her veins like fire, wrung every last shining second out of what she had left and drank deep of it. It _was_ her, warrior, saviour, queen of battles. Slayer.

He was at her side, her lionheart, her good right arm. He’d been born for the fight as much as she had. There in the heart of it, with every flare of magic lighting up his beautiful fierce face in the night, the explosions rattling her chest, she could feel his savage exultation. There was no difference between it, for them; sex and battle, just the same. Her heart beat in his chest. She snarled through his fangs.

And all around them, chaos. Portals to other worlds, unknowable horrors bursting through. Dawn’s blood had opened all the doors, and she was gone. No way to win from here, no way to beat them back. Only _hold_!

The two of them circled the mansion, closing in on it in a long spiral. The air was hot, and dry, and the ground was dusty. They passed the human leaders, the diminutive woman and the laconic old man, fighting back to back at the mouth of a portal-doorway, surrounded by demons, bodies piled about them. Spike and Buffy forced back the wave, bought the two a breather, moved on with barely a nod.

Merlin was not much more than a child now, yet he was holding his own. He was limned with white fire, and his eyes were ageless, merciless and frightening. He won a battle, sought another. They ran on.

The Fates, all three, hands joined, walked gracefully through the middle of a skirmish of demons and humans. Every blow aimed at them swung wide. They never paused, never altered their path, but they passed through unscathed. As Buffy and Spike ran past, one reached out a stately hand, touched a demon on the forehead delicately with a finger. It fell dead. They left a trail of bodies behind them.

At the next portal, the Conduit stood her ground, half-hunched, blood soaking her dress, her face twisted with pain and rage. She thrust out her hand and blasted a ragged torrent of fire at a horrible, many-legged thing, all eyes and blades. It retreated but did not fall. She staggered, held for now.

Whistler held an axe uncertainly, fighting alongside the two djinn. A vampire who had helped them evacuate New York puffed into dust right before their eyes. The long-limbed old lady who had asked Spike for tea screamed like an animal as she skewered demons two at a time. 

All around them, death. _Hold, hold, hold!_

==

They reached the mansion, where Angel was defending the portico and Willow. He was snarling, covered in ichor and blood not his own, but the portal closest to him was empty – he’d won, for now. As Spike passed him by, Angel clapped him on the shoulder, and Spike managed to conceal his surprise and do the same. The two shared a look Buffy couldn’t decipher.

She looked at them both there, the elder vampire so powerful and grave, the younger all rangy grace and energy, and she thought her heart might burst from pride and sadness.

“Are they holding?” asked Angel.

Spike nodded. “For now. It’s not enough, though. All this for nothing, if she doesn’t come…”

“She’ll come,” said Angel. “This much power, this much chaos, it’ll pull her in eventually. She’ll come.”

Willow cried out quietly from behind him, a sad, desperate little noise. They hastened to her side while Angel set himself to guard once more. Buffy could see her eyes dimming. She was going, again.

“Hold on, Will, come on! This is the last time – we’re all here, we need you – be strong, I know you can. Remember all the things here we’re trying to save…” 

Willow was barely listening. The chaos was overwhelming her. She began to look around, confused and frightened, eyelids fluttering, retreating into herself as Buffy spoke to her urgently.

Buffy grabbed her shoulders. “Will! Come back to-”

==

She found herself lying on her back in the dirt, gasping, winded. _What?_ She didn’t remember falling – had Willow hit her? Everything was spinning. The noise was deafening. Explosions, screaming, horrible tearing sounds. Someone was shouting her name, distantly. Spike.

Running footsteps, crunching in the dry, dead grass, and then he was there at her side, face tight with worry. “Buffy? Are you…?” He saw her starting to rise, relaxed, offered her a hand up. His hand was cool in hers.

“That was quite a flight, Slayer. Must have been fifty yards, and clear over Angelus’s head.” 

A hand to her side, she flexed her aching back. She gave her head an experimental shake. All still functional. “No time to add up points for style and dismount. Will’s gone again?” He nodded grimly. 

Before she could set off, another of those horrible sounds, rending, tearing, and a doorway opened before them. She’d dropped her axe when Willow hit her, but Spike tossed her a knife. She snatched it from the air, and they set themselves ready for what came.

She couldn’t believe what the first demon through was holding. “Hey! That’s _mine_!”

Tarnished, broken, scarred – but the blade was still sharp, and the feeling of _hers_ was ringing in her head. The scythe. Spike saw it too, and even in the noise and the chaos and the rising wind she saw his head come up, his back straighten. _The scythe, the sister, the seed…_

They dived for it. 

==

They were staggering back to Willow at the doorway of the manor, holding the scythe, and Spike was bleeding heavily, when it hit. One moment, there was battle raging all around, noise and death, and she was trying to watch in every direction for the next attack, and then suddenly there was silence. A moment of stillness, and behind it swept in a great deep roar, and there she was, at the end of the great driveway. Illyria.

The earth rolled, wave after wave of shaking, tossing them all about in the wreckage. They struggled, staggered to their feet only to fall again. And the screaming! A cacophony, a thousand different horrible screeching yells, all at once. Never had there been such a tortured sound. 

Buffy screwed up her eyes against the noise. She thought she might be screaming too, but there was no room in her head for it, nothing but the sound. _Fall back, get away!_ What could a scythe do against this, what difference could it make? The power here could boil oceans. It was tearing reality apart beneath their feet.

She knew then that they had been wrong, must have been. They had thought they needed to bring Illyria here for the spell. Will had said she could package everything back up with the Seed, rewind all the strings, _back to the beginning_ , but not with Illyria’s chaos still in the equation. She could shatter it all, was shattering it now. They had thought to remove her, or control her, or release her. But… _how could they_?

As Illyria advanced, Whistler fell beneath the onslaught of power. He crumbled into nothing. She saw the body of the Conduit, her face surprised, angry, not at peace at all. Persephone burned like green wood. All around her, they were falling, or had fallen already. Death, everywhere she looked.

_No_...

The destruction faltered – just for a second – then, again, a stutter. 

Fred stood in the wreckage, an island of tranquility in the carnage, just a woman, wavering. She flickered into Illyria again, and back. Fred held on, fell to her knees. 

Buffy looked to Spike, his face set with pain, greying, determined. “Willow,” he said, through gritted teeth. “It’s gonna have to be now…”

“But Illyria – she’ll tear it all apart…”

“She’ll do that anyway if we don’t _move_!” 

She nodded, dragged his arm across her shoulders. They fell back to the portico, where Willow remained. Angel was crouched over her where she moaned on the mat, her body curled around the Seed. He was shaking her by the shoulders roughly, begging and commanding her by turns, but she was failing. They all were.

The earth began to shake again. The screaming.

_They had already lost…_

Time slowed for Buffy. The words thumped into her head, the leaden weight of them, the echo. _It’s done. We didn’t get there in time._

Spike was fading. They’d known what they would need, and it had come too late. What good could a weapon do, now? She felt it, in her hand, the smooth grain so familiar. She remembered how it had felt, the first time she and Willow saved the world with it. Everything had seemed so bright, then. They’d been so powerful, so able. _Are you ready to be strong?_

And then she knew.

She flowed like water. Shoved Angel to one side, lifted Willow’s head, pressed the scythe into her hands, whispered.

“Remember, Will. Are you ready to be strong?”

Nothing, nothing… 

Then Willow’s hands tightened around hers. Their eyes met. The light began to build.

==

Time was still fluid. She turned from Willow, the wind lifting her hair, and sprinted toward Fred, Illyria, Fred again. With every wave of power she could feel reality thinning, flaking away from her. She felt as if the very atoms of herself were straining apart from one another. She could feel Willow’s power building behind her, but the spell alone wasn’t enough. Illyria’s presence in the world was tearing it apart, faster than it could be fixed.

Buffy knew what had to be done. _Hold, damnit!_ She had never known, really, what she was, but she called on every scrap of the grit and power and sheer determination and _love_ that had kept her alive so long, and begged it to hold her together for long enough to do what was necessary.

She ran along a knife-edge of chance, could feel it beneath her. Spike was right there running with her, his last strength her counterbalance. They’d been on this path since the day they met. She could feel the weight of every second, bearing them along to this moment, time’s every arrow pointing here.

The earth stilled, again. Fred knelt on the ground, the soil melted to glass around her. Her face was open and guileless. She looked, calmly, from her to Spike.

“I’m sorry,” she said to both of them. Her face was glowing in the light from Willow, behind them. She looked holy, transcendent.

“Me too,” said Buffy, as she stepped toward her, gently pushed the knife under Fred’s ribs. “The best we can do now… let’s try it all again.”

The light grew blinding. It began to spread as she stepped away from Fred. The body, just a woman, now, fell.

They saw the light consume Angel. His face, there at the end, looked peaceful.

Spike stood at her side.

“Love…”

“I’ll find you, just the same,” she said. “As fast as I can.”

The two of them, together, shared a look that lasted just a moment. He looked proud, bloodied, beautiful, and ferocious. There was a roaring in her ears. She found her footing. Their hands clasped tightly. 

With all their strength, together, they leaped into the light. 

==

Their story ended there, along with everything. But stories have a way about them, and we all know this wasn’t the only time they came together, and loved, and died, for the world and for each other.

It wasn’t the only time she was chosen. Not the only time he died, and lived again a dead man. A thousand times over, they were enemies, allies, demons, gods, strangers, friends, heroes, myths…

And lovers, every time. She always found him.

In the darkness, once again, a spark.

Back to the beginning.

==

==

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,

That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,

Its ancient tale of being apart or together.

As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,

Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:

You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.

At the heart of time, love of one for another.

We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same

Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-

Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you

The love of all man’s days both past and forever:

Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.

The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –

And the songs of every poet past and forever.

**_Rabindranath Tagore_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hope you liked this story - it's the first thing I have ever written, fic or no, and so if you have thoughts I'd absolutely love to hear them!
> 
> Thanks again to NellinHell on Elysian Fields, without whom this story would never have left the single sheet of notepaper I jotted an outline on during a very boring lockdown meeting. A truly excellent editor, and a wonderful supporter and friend.


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